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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Thibault Formal , Maxime Louis , Hervé Dejean , Stéphane Clinchant

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Improving Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) requires benchmarks that can precisely validate architectural innovations. However, current SAE benchmarks on LLMs are often too noisy to differentiate architectural improvements, and current synthetic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Claire Tian , Katherine Tian , Nathan Hu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting language model activations by decomposing them into sparse, interpretable features. A popular approach is the TopK SAE, that uses a fixed number of the most active…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Bart Bussmann , Patrick Leask , Neel Nanda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) that can accurately reconstruct their input (minimizing distortion) by making efficient use of few features (minimizing the rate) often fail to learn monosemantic representations (highly interpretable), limiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tommaso Mencattini , Francesco Montagna , Francesco Locatello

Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dan Braun , Jordan Taylor , Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill , Lee Sharkey

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiangchen Song , Aashiq Muhamed , Yujia Zheng , Lingjing Kong , Zeyu Tang , Mona T. Diab , Virginia Smith , Kun Zhang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a core interpretability tool for large language models, and progress on SAE architectures depends on benchmarks that reliably distinguish better SAEs from worse ones. We audit the SAE quality metrics in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 David Chanin

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to extracting features from neural networks, enabling model interpretability as well as causal interventions on model internals. SAEs generate sparse feature representations using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Kola Ayonrinde

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Piotr Jedryszek , Oliver M. Crook

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xuan Yang , Jiayu Liu , Yuhang Lai , Hao Xu , Zhenya Huang , Ning Miao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

Sparse Autoencoders have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting the internal representations of Large Language Models, yet they often fail to capture domain-specific features not prevalent in their training corpora. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Nikita Koriagin , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Laptev , Gleb Gerasimov , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov