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Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable…
Subsampling is used in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the form of pooling or strided convolutions, to reduce the spatial dimensions of feature maps and to allow the receptive fields to grow exponentially with depth. However, it is…
SAEs have recently been employed as a promising unsupervised approach for understanding the representations of layers of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, with the growth in model size and complexity, training SAEs is computationally…
In this paper we propose Structuring AutoEncoders (SAE). SAEs are neural networks which learn a low dimensional representation of data which are additionally enriched with a desired structure in this low dimensional space. While traditional…
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…
Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering…
For large language models (LLMs), sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting language model activations by decomposing them into sparse, interpretable features. A popular approach is the TopK SAE, that uses a fixed number of the most active…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to probe Large Language Models (LLMs) and extract interpretable concepts from their internal representations. These concepts are linear combinations of neuron activations that…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires learned features to be both interpretable and…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerged as a promising tool for mechanistic interpretability of transformer-based foundation models. Very recently, SAEs were also adopted for the visual domain, enabling the discovery of visual concepts and their…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices. To improve stability, we studied…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been widely used for interpretability of neural networks, but their learned features often vary across seeds and hyperparameter settings. We introduce Ordered Sparse Autoencoders (OSAE), which extend…
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…
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…
Scientific archives now contain hundreds of petabytes of data across genomics, ecology, climate, and molecular biology that could reveal undiscovered patterns if systematically analyzed at scale. Large-scale, weakly-supervised datasets in…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) aim to decompose the activation space of large language models (LLMs) into human-interpretable latent directions or features. As we increase the number of features in the SAE, hierarchical features tend to split…
We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language…
A popular new method in mechanistic interpretability is to train high-dimensional sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on neuron activations and use SAE features as the atomic units of analysis. However, the body of evidence on whether SAE feature…