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One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is \textit{polysemanticity}, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Hoagy Cunningham , Aidan Ewart , Logan Riggs , Robert Huben , Lee Sharkey

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for learning interpretable features from neural network activations. However, the optimization landscape for SAE training can be challenging due to correlations in the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ashwin Saraswatula , David Klindt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Nikita Koriagin , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Laptev , Gleb Gerasimov , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without task-specific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Xinwei Wu , Heng Liu , Xiaohu Zhao , Yuqi Ren , Linlong Xu , Longyue Wang , Deyi Xiong , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

What latent features are encoded in language model (LM) representations? Recent work on training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle interpretable features in LM representations has shown significant promise. However, evaluating the…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpreting language model activations. A key evaluation metric is the increase in cross-entropy loss between the original model logits and the reconstructed model logits when replacing model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Adam Karvonen

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yunpeng Zhou

Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but often lack interpretability and controllability. This paper introduces a novel approach using sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret and control dense embeddings via the learned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hao Kang , Tevin Wang , Chenyan Xiong

Previous studies primarily utilize MLP neurons as units of analysis for understanding the mechanisms of factual knowledge in Language Models (LMs); however, neurons suffer from polysemanticity, leading to limited knowledge expression and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yuheng Chen , Pengfei Cao , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Recent studies in interpretability have explored the inner workings of transformer models trained on tasks across various domains, often discovering that these networks naturally develop highly structured representations. When such…

In this thesis, we develop methods to enhance the interpretability of recent representation learning techniques in natural language processing (NLP) while accounting for the unavailability of annotated data. We choose to leverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Ghazi Felhi

Effective and reliable control over large language model (LLM) behavior is a significant challenge. While activation steering methods, which add steering vectors to a model's hidden states, are a promising approach, existing techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Samuel Soo , Chen Guang , Wesley Teng , Chandrasekaran Balaganesh , Tan Guoxian , Yan Ming

A key goal in mechanistic interpretability is circuit analysis: finding sparse subgraphs of models corresponding to specific behaviors or capabilities. However, MLP sublayers make fine-grained circuit analysis on transformer-based language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Jacob Dunefsky , Philippe Chlenski , Neel Nanda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a useful tool for interpreting the internal representations of neural networks. However, naively optimising SAEs for reconstruction loss and sparsity results in a preference for SAEs that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Kola Ayonrinde , Michael T. Pearce , Lee Sharkey

Recent work on sparse autoencoders (SAEs) has shown promise in extracting interpretable features from neural networks and addressing challenges with polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. In this paper, we apply SAEs to the early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Liv Gorton

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Jacob S. Prince , Matthew Kowal , Victor Boutin , Isabel Papadimitriou , Binxu Wang , Martin Wattenberg , Demba Ba , Talia Konkle

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

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Muhammed Furkan Dasdelen , Hyesu Lim , Michele Buck , Katharina S. Götze , Carsten Marr , Steffen Schneider

It is assumed that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic activations into interpretable linear directions, as long as the activations are composed of sparse linear combinations of underlying features. However, we find that if an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 David Chanin , Tomáš Dulka , Adrià Garriga-Alonso