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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Li Lei , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a natural path toward comparable explanations across different representation spaces. However, current SAEs are trained per modality, producing dictionaries whose features are not directly understandable and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Difei Gu , Yunhe Gao , Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zihan Dong , Guoning Zhang , Bangwei Guo , Yang Zhou , Mu Zhou , Dimitris Metaxas

As black box models and pretrained models gain traction in time series applications, understanding and explaining their predictions becomes increasingly vital, especially in high-stakes domains where interpretability and trust are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Khalid Oublal , Quentin Bouniot , Qi Gan , Stephan Clémençon , Zeynep Akata

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

The goal of a classification model is to assign the correct labels to data. In most cases, this data is not fully described by the given set of labels. Often a rich set of meaningful concepts exist in the domain that can much more precisely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-23 Yoeri Poels , Vlado Menkovski

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features represented in frontier models, it will be necessary to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Anish Mudide , Joshua Engels , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Christian Schroeder de Witt

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Fabian Morelli , Arnas Uselis , Ankit Sonthalia , Seong Joon Oh

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a mechanistic interpretability technique that have been used to provide insight into learned concepts within large protein language models. Here, we employ TopK and Ordered SAEs to investigate autoregressive…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool for analyzing and interpreting the activation space of transformer-based language models (LMs). However, SAEs suffer several shortcomings that diminish their utility and internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

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

Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Philipp Wesp , Robbie Holland , Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa , Sergios Gatidis

A common goal of mechanistic interpretability is to decompose the activations of neural networks into features: interpretable properties of the input computed by the model. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for finding these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Patrick Leask , Bart Bussmann , Michael Pearce , Joseph Bloom , Curt Tigges , Noura Al Moubayed , Lee Sharkey , Neel Nanda

A large part of the literature on learning disentangled representations focuses on variational autoencoders (VAE). Recent developments demonstrate that disentanglement cannot be obtained in a fully unsupervised setting without inductive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Graziano Mita , Maurizio Filippone , Pietro Michiardi

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are one of the main methods to interpret the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs), decomposing activations into higher-dimensional features. However, they exhibit critical shortcomings where a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michał Brzozowski , Neo Christopher Chung

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

Causal disentanglement has great potential for capturing complex situations. However, there is a lack of practical and efficient approaches. It is already known that most unsupervised disentangling methods are unable to produce identifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Heejeong Nam

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

Concepts are key building blocks of higher level human understanding. Explainable AI (XAI) methods have shown tremendous progress in recent years, however, local attribution methods do not allow to identify coherent model behavior across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Johanna Vielhaben , Stefan Blücher , Nils Strodthoff