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Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation and are increasingly integrated into the software development process. However, ensuring the correctness of LLM-generated code remains a critical…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Thanh Trong Vu , Tuan-Dung Bui , Thu-Trang Nguyen , Son Nguyen , Hieu Dinh Vo

Large language models can be uncertain yet correct, or confident yet wrong, raising the question of whether their output-level uncertainty and their actual correctness are driven by the same internal mechanisms or by distinct feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Het Patel , Tiejin Chen , Hua Wei , Evangelos E. Papalexakis , Jia Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become powerful tools for automated code generation. However, these models often overlook critical security practices, which can result in the generation of insecure code that contains…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Hao Yan , Swapneel Suhas Vaidya , Xiaokuan Zhang , Ziyu Yao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xuan Yang , Jiayu Liu , Yuhang Lai , Hao Xu , Zhenya Huang , Ning Miao

This study investigates the reliability of code generation by Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on identifying and analyzing defects in the generated code. Despite the advanced capabilities of LLMs in automating code generation,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Ali Mohammadi Esfahani , Nafiseh Kahani , Samuel A. Ajila

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to steer large language models (LLMs), based on the assumption that their interpretable features naturally enable effective model behavior steering. Yet, a fundamental question remains unanswered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Xu Wang , Yan Hu , Benyou Wang , Difan Zou

Despite the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) for code generation, they often output incorrect code. One reason is that model output probabilities are often not well-correlated with correctness, and reflect only the final output…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Francisco Ribeiro , Claudio Spiess , Prem Devanbu , Sarah Nadi

Recent work shows that Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) applied to large language model (LLM) layers have neurons corresponding to interpretable concepts. These SAE neurons can be modified to align generated outputs, but only towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ananya Joshi , Celia Cintas , Skyler Speakman

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Zirui He , Mingyu Jin , Bo Shen , Ali Payani , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

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

Intermediate layers of large language models (LLMs) best predict human brain responses to language, one of the most robust findings in computational neurolinguistics, yet why remains mechanistically unexplained. We address this gap by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to automatically label and analyze educational dialogue at scale, yet current pipelines lack reliable ways to detect when models are wrong. We investigate whether reasoning generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Bakhtawar Ahtisham , Kirk Vanacore , Zhuqian Zhou , Jinsook Lee , Rene F. Kizilcec

Large language models (LLMs) have become proficient at sophisticated code-generation tasks, yet remain ineffective at reliably detecting or avoiding code vulnerabilities. Does this deficiency stem from insufficient learning about code…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Weichen Yu , Ravi Mangal , Terry Zhuo , Matt Fredrikson , Corina S. Pasareanu

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

Large language models (LLMs) have become essential tools in software development, widely used for requirements engineering, code generation and review tasks. Software engineers often rely on LLMs to assess whether system code implementation…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Haolin Jin , Huaming Chen

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mateusz Pach , Shyamgopal Karthik , Quentin Bouniot , Serge Belongie , Zeynep Akata

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used by software engineers for programming tasks. However, research shows that LLMs often lack a deep understanding of program semantics. Even minor changes to syntax, such as renaming variables, can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Francesca Lucchetti , Arjun Guha

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