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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…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into sparsely activating features, but many SAE features are only interpretable at high activation strengths. To address this issue we propose to use binary sparse…
We introduce sparse autoencoder neural operators (SAE-NOs), a new class of sparse autoencoders that operate in function spaces rather than fixed-dimensional Euclidean representations. We formalize the functional representation hypothesis,…
Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…
The Linear Representation Hypothesis asserts that the embeddings learned by neural networks can be understood as linear combinations of features corresponding to high-level concepts. Based on this ansatz, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have…
Understanding and mitigating the potential risks associated with foundation models (FMs) hinges on developing effective interpretability methods. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for disentangling FM…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability research for large language models; however, the state-of-the-art method of using $k$-sparse autoencoders lacks a theoretical grounding for selecting the…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as pivotal tools for introspection into large language models. SAEs can uncover high-quality, interpretable features at different levels of granularity and enable targeted steering of the…
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…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated significant success in interpreting Large Language Models (LLMs) by decomposing dense representations into sparse, semantic components. However, their potential for analyzing Vision Transformers…
Sparse Autoencoders have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting the internal representations of Large Language Models, yet they often fail to capture domain-specific features not prevalent in their training corpora. This paper…
Pathology plays an important role in disease diagnosis, treatment decision-making and drug development. Previous works on interpretability for machine learning models on pathology images have revolved around methods such as attention value…
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…
Learning hierarchical features in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) is essential for capturing the structured nature of real-world data and mitigating issues like feature absorption or splitting. Existing works attempt to identify hierarchical…
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…
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…
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…
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…