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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

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Kenny Peng , Rajiv Movva , Jon Kleinberg , Emma Pierson , Nikhil Garg

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Lucia Quirke , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Chris Sainsbury , Feng Dong , Andreas Karwath

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

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

A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Constantin Venhoff , Anisoara Calinescu , Philip Torr , Christian Schroeder de Witt

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 promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo and Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Seonglae Cho , Harryn Oh , Donghyun Lee , Luis Eduardo Rodrigues Vieira , Andrew Bermingham , Ziad El Sayed

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) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network's internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jeffrey Olmo , Jared Wilson , Max Forsey , Bryce Hepner , Thomas Vin Howe , David Wingate

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sewoong Lee , Adam Davies , Marc E. Canby , Julia Hockenmaier

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose \textsc{Mutual Feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Luke Marks , Alasdair Paren , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting large language models (LLMs) by decomposing token activations into combinations of human-understandable features. While SAEs provide crucial insights into LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhen Xu , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Kaidi Xu , Tianlong Chen

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs), revealing latent latent features with semantical meaning. This interpretability has also…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-07-11 Haoxiang Guan , Jiyan He , Jie Zhang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a core interpretability tool for large language models, and progress on SAE architectures depends on benchmarks that reliably distinguish better SAEs from worse ones. We audit the SAE quality metrics in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 David Chanin

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed as an unsupervised approach to learn a decomposition of a model's latent space. This enables useful applications such as steering - influencing the output of a model towards a desired concept -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Yonatan Belinkov

Translating the internal representations and computations of models into concepts that humans can understand is a key goal of interpretability. While recent dictionary learning methods such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Usha Bhalla , Alex Oesterling , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio P. Calmon

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Zachary Baker , Yuxiao Li