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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a standard tool for mechanistic interpretability in autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling researchers to extract sparse, human-interpretable features and intervene on model behavior.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to optimization-based jailbreak attacks that exploit internal gradient structure. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpretability, their robustness implications remain…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting neural networks by extracting the concepts represented in their activations. However, choosing the size of the SAE dictionary (i.e. number of learned concepts)…
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for adapting large language models, yet the internal representational changes induced by LoRA fine-tuning remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are now standard tools for decomposing language model activations into interpretable features, and automated interpretability pipelines routinely assign each feature a short natural-language explanation. Existing…
Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…
Although sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are crucial for identifying interpretable features in neural networks, it is still challenging to distinguish between real computational patterns and erroneous correlations. We introduce Model-X knockoffs…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a useful tool for interpreting the internal representations of neural networks. However, naively optimising SAEs for reconstruction loss and sparsity results in a preference for SAEs that are…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) operationalise the linear representation hypothesis: they reconstruct model activations as sparse linear combinations of interpretable dictionary atoms, on the implicit assumption that activation space is well…
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…
Steering has emerged as a promising approach in controlling large language models (LLMs) without modifying model parameters. However, most existing steering methods rely on large-scale datasets to learn clear behavioral information, which…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to decompose neural networks into interpretable features and map their connecting circuits. The standard approach trains sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on each layer's activations. However, SAEs trained in…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for interpreting and steering the internal representations of large language models (LLMs). However, conventional approaches to analyzing SAEs typically rely solely on…
Large Language Model (LLM) deployment requires guiding the LLM to recognize and not answer unsafe prompts while complying with safe prompts. Previous methods for achieving this require adjusting model weights along with other expensive…
The standard sparse-autoencoder (SAE) interpretability protocol labels each feature from its top-activating contexts and validates by single-feature steering. We propose the pairwise matrix protocol, co-varying steering coefficient with…
Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research…
We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation…
While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…