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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable feature-level mechanistic interpretability and activation steering in large language models (LLMs), but SAE-based language control remains unreliable in multilingual settings: most SAEs are trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yusser Al Ghussin , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Patrick Schramowski , Simon Ostermann

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Unsupervised feature extractors are known to perform an efficient and discriminative representation of data. Insight into the mappings they perform and human ability to understand them, however, remain very limited. This is especially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Babajide O. Ayinde , Jacek M. Zurada

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Tom Lieberum , Nicolas Sonnerat , Arthur Conmy , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Neel Nanda

Software vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows and SQL injections are a major source of security breaches. Traditional methods for vulnerability detection remain essential but are limited by high false positive rates, scalability issues,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Rui Melo , Claudia Mamede , Andre Catarino , Rui Abreu , Henrique Lopes Cardoso

ISAC enables pervasive monitoring, but modern sensing algorithms are often too complex for energy-constrained edge devices. This motivates the development of learning techniques that balance accuracy performance and energy efficiency.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Eleonora Cicciarella , Riccardo Mazzieri , Jacopo Pegoraro , Michele Rossi

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

Speech holds promise as a cost-effective and non-invasive biomarker for neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD). While deep learning systems trained on raw audio can find subtle signals not available from hand-crafted…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-24 Peter Plantinga , Jen-Kai Chen , Roozbeh Sattari , Mirco Ravanelli , Denise Klein

Sparse autoencoders are a standard tool for uncovering interpretable latent representations in neural networks. Yet, their interpretation depends on the inputs, making their isolated study incomplete. Polynomials offer a solution; they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Thomas Dooms , Ward Gauderis

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable interpretability research by decomposing entangled model activations into monosemantic features. However, under what circumstances SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety, a low-frequency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jiaqi Weng , Han Zheng , Hanyu Zhang , Ej Zhou , Qinqin He , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Zhixuan Chu , Xiting Wang

We introduce a simple new regularizer for auto-encoders whose hidden-unit activation functions contain at least one zero-gradient (saturated) region. This regularizer explicitly encourages activations in the saturated region(s) of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-21 Rostislav Goroshin , Yann LeCun

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic neural representations, where neurons respond to multiple unrelated concepts, into monosemantic features that capture single, interpretable concepts. However, standard training objectives…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Ali Nasiri-Sarvi , Anh Tien Nguyen , Hassan Rivaz , Dimitris Samaras , Mahdi S. Hosseini

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) aim to disentangle model activations into monosemantic, human-interpretable features. In practice, learned features are often redundant and vary across training runs and sparsity levels, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Cristina P. Martin-Linares , Jonathan P. Ling

Bottleneck autoencoders have been actively researched as a solution to image compression tasks. However, we observed that bottleneck autoencoders produce subjectively low quality reconstructed images. In this work, we explore the ability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-25 Yijing Watkins , Mohammad Sayeh , Oleksandr Iaroshenko , Garrett Kenyon

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a core interpretability tool for large language models, and progress on SAE architectures depends on benchmarks that reliably distinguish better SAEs from worse ones. We audit the SAE quality metrics in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 David Chanin

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Michael A. Riegler , Birk Sebastian Frostelid Torpmann-Hagen

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to discover sparse and human-interpretable representations of the latent activations of LLMs. However, we would ultimately like to understand the computations performed by LLMs and not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Lucy Farnik , Tim Lawson , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison