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We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yiting Liu , Zhi-Hong Deng

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of their interpretations due to the lack of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Subhash Kantamneni , Joshua Engels , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Max Tegmark , Neel Nanda

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

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have become a prevalent tool for interpreting language models' inner workings. However, it is unknown how tightly SAE features correspond to computationally important directions in the model. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Thomas Dooms , Daniel Wilhelm

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a standard tool for mechanistic interpretability in autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling researchers to extract sparse, human-interpretable features and intervene on model behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Xu Wang , Bingqing Jiang , Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Lingpeng Kong , Difan Zou

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Charles O'Neill , Christine Ye , Kartheik Iyer , John F. Wu

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

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

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

A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Charles O'Neill , Alim Gumran , David Klindt

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ege Erdogan , Ana Lucic

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

Recent work by Anthropic on Mechanistic interpretability claims to understand and control Large Language Models by extracting human-interpretable features from their neural activation patterns using sparse autoencoders (SAEs). If…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Raphael Ronge , Markus Maier , Frederick Eberhardt

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract interpretable features from neural network representations, often under the implicit assumption that concepts correspond to independent linear directions. However, a growing body of…

Adapting foundation models for specific purposes has become a standard approach to build machine learning systems for downstream applications. Yet, it is an open question which mechanisms take place during adaptation. Here we develop a new…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Hyesu Lim , Jinho Choi , Jaegul Choo , Steffen Schneider

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

Audio pretrained models are widely employed to solve various tasks in speech processing, sound event detection, or music information retrieval. However, the representations learned by these models are unclear, and their analysis mainly…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie