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Related papers: Distribution-Aware Feature Selection for SAEs

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Autoencoders have been widely used as a nonlinear tool for data dimensionality reduction. While autoencoders don't utilize the label information, Centroid-Encoders (CE)\cite{ghosh2022supervised} use the class label in their learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Tomojit Ghosh , Michael Kirby

A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Constantin Venhoff , Anisoara Calinescu , Philip Torr , Christian Schroeder de Witt

Understanding how features evolve across layers in deep neural networks is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability, particularly due to polysemanticity and feature superposition. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Nikita Balagansky , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable features from Large Language Models, but standard variants enforce non-negativity, forcing separate latents for diametrically opposed concepts (e.g., "pressure too high" vs. "pressure too…

Latent steering exploits internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide generation, yet interventions on dense states can entangle distinct semantic features. In this paper, we investigate attention query activations as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

In recent years, the long-range attention mechanism of vision transformers has driven significant performance breakthroughs across various computer vision tasks. However, the traditional self-attention mechanism, which processes both…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tianyi Zhang , Baoxin Li , Jae-sun Seo , Yu Cao

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

Feature selection reduces the dimensionality of data by identifying a subset of the most informative features. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework for unsupervised feature selection, called fractal autoencoders (FAE). It…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Xinxing Wu , Qiang Cheng

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated significant promise in interpreting the hidden states of language models by decomposing them into interpretable latent directions. However, training and interpreting SAEs at scale remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Vadim Kurochkin , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Laptev , Daniil Gavrilov , Nikita Balagansky

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Tsogt-Ochir Enkhbayar

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Shruti Joshi , Andrea Dittadi , Sébastien Lachapelle , Dhanya Sridhar

Many complicated real-world tasks can be broken down into smaller, more manageable parts, and planning with prior knowledge extracted from these simplified pieces is crucial for humans to make accurate decisions. However, replicating this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Jingqing Ruan , Kaishen Wang , Qingyang Zhang , Dengpeng Xing , Bo Xu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs), revealing latent latent features with semantical meaning. This interpretability has also…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-07-11 Haoxiang Guan , Jiyan He , Jie Zhang

Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-10 Omar Claflin

Collecting the most informative data from a large dataset distributed over a network is a fundamental problem in many fields, including control, signal processing and machine learning. In this paper, we establish a connection between…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-05 Xu Zhang , Marcos M. Vasconcelos

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is showing promising results in improving parameter sharing in multi-task learning (MTL) and in scaling high-capacity neural networks. State-of-the-art MoE models use a trainable sparse gate to…

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but often lack interpretability and controllability. This paper introduces a novel approach using sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret and control dense embeddings via the learned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hao Kang , Tevin Wang , Chenyan Xiong

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) successfully extract interpretable features from language models, applying them to audio generation faces unique challenges: audio's dense nature requires compression that obscures semantic meaning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Nathan Paek , Yongyi Zang , Qihui Yang , Randal Leistikow