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Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network's internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jeffrey Olmo , Jared Wilson , Max Forsey , Bryce Hepner , Thomas Vin Howe , David Wingate

Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Arthur Conmy , Lewis Smith , Tom Lieberum , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Rohin Shah , Neel Nanda

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

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

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jack Gallifant , Shan Chen , Kuleen Sasse , Hugo Aerts , Thomas Hartvigsen , Danielle S. Bitterman

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Abhinav Menon , Manish Shrivastava , David Krueger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

Recent advances in explainable machine learning have highlighted the potential of sparse autoencoders in uncovering mono-semantic features in densely encoded embeddings. While most research has focused on Large Language Model (LLM)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Daniel Pluth , Yu Zhou , Vijay K. Gurbani

Translating the internal representations and computations of models into concepts that humans can understand is a key goal of interpretability. While recent dictionary learning methods such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Usha Bhalla , Alex Oesterling , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio P. Calmon

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been used widely to decompose and interpret neural network activations, especially those of transformer language models. One key issue with SAEs is their inability to directly model multidimensional features.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Collin Francel

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dong Shu , Xuansheng Wu , Haiyan Zhao , Mengnan Du , Ninghao Liu

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

Modern LLMs face inference efficiency challenges due to their scale. To address this, many compression methods have been proposed, such as pruning and quantization. However, the effect of compression on a model's interpretability remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Suchit Gupte , Vishnu Kabir Chhabra , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

Many current state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendations are based on transformer architectures. Interpretation and explanation of such black box models is an important research question, as a better understanding of their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Anton Klenitskiy , Konstantin Polev , Daria Denisova , Alexey Vasilev , Dmitry Simakov , Gleb Gusev

Audio classification and restoration are among major downstream tasks in audio signal processing. However, restoration derives less of a benefit from pretrained models compared to the overwhelming success of pretrained models in…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to extract interpretable features from language models by enforcing a sparsity constraint. Ideally, training an SAE would yield latents that are both sparse and semantically meaningful. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Xiaoqing Sun , Alessandro Stolfo , Joshua Engels , Ben Wu , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Mrinmaya Sachan , Max Tegmark

Transformer models have become state-of-the-art in decoding stimuli and behavior from neural activity, significantly advancing neuroscience research. Yet greater transparency in their decision-making processes would substantially enhance…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2025-06-18 Laurence Freeman , Philip Shamash , Vinam Arora , Caswell Barry , Tiago Branco , Eva Dyer

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 been applied to large language models and protein language models, but not systematically to electronic health record (EHR) foundation models. We train TopK SAEs on FlatASCEND, a 14.5-million-parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Chris Sainsbury , Feng Dong , Andreas Karwath