Related papers: Rethinking Sparse Autoencoders: Select-and-Project…

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…

The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into sparsely activating features, but many SAE features are only interpretable at high activation strengths. To address this issue we propose to use binary sparse…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires learned features to be both interpretable and…

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…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring how interpretable they are remains challenging, with weak consensus about which benchmarks to use. Most…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…

We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…

Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are…

LLMs increasingly require surgical model editing to enhance domain-specific capabilities without incurring the computational cost or catastrophic forgetting associated with full fine-tuning. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

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) have emerged as a powerful technique for decomposing language model representations into interpretable features. Current interpretation methods infer feature semantics from activation patterns, but overlook that…

Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability to project LLM activations onto sparse latent spaces. However, sparsity alone is an imperfect proxy for interpretability, and current training objectives often…

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP demonstrate remarkable zero-shot performance across diverse tasks. However, fine-tuning these models to improve downstream performance often degrades robustness against distribution…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for interpreting neural networks by decomposing their activations into sparse sets of human-interpretable features. Recent work has introduced multiple SAE variants and…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…

Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…