Related papers: CorrSteer: Generation-Time LLM Steering via Correl…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a central tool for interpreting language models. However, two key SAE analyses that remain difficult to scale are (1) matching semantically similar features across multi-layers and (2) compressing…
Large language models (LLMs) can store a significant amount of factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their parametric knowledge may conflict with the information provided in the context -- this phenomenon, known as…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…
In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…
It is assumed that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic activations into interpretable linear directions, as long as the activations are composed of sparse linear combinations of underlying features. However, we find that if an…
A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that SAEs…
Predicting protein function from amino acid sequence remains a central challenge in data-scarce (low-$N$) regimes, limiting machine learning-guided protein design when only small amounts of assay-labeled sequence-function data are…
For large language models (LLMs), sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but these techniques require many expensive backward passes…
Jailbreak attacks remain a persistent threat to large language model safety. We propose Context-Conditioned Delta Steering (CC-Delta), an SAE-based defense that identifies jailbreak-relevant sparse features by comparing token-level…
Role-playing has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on prompt engineering, which often lacks stability and interpretability.…
Understanding the internal representations of large language models is crucial for ensuring their reliability and safety, with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerging as a promising interpretability approach. However, current SAE training…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…
Sensitive directions experiments attempt to understand the computational features of Language Models (LMs) by measuring how much the next token prediction probabilities change by perturbing activations along specific directions. We extend…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied…