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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Akshay Kulkarni , Tsui-Wei Weng , Vivek Narayanaswamy , Shusen Liu , Wesam A. Sakla , Kowshik Thopalli

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

Recent work shows that Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) applied to large language model (LLM) layers have neurons corresponding to interpretable concepts. These SAE neurons can be modified to align generated outputs, but only towards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ananya Joshi , Celia Cintas , Skyler Speakman

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mateusz Pach , Shyamgopal Karthik , Quentin Bouniot , Serge Belongie , Zeynep Akata

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 David Chanin , James Wilken-Smith , Tomáš Dulka , Hardik Bhatnagar , Satvik Golechha , Joseph Bloom

While large language models provide strong compositional reasoning, existing reasoning segmentation pipelines fail to transparently connect this reasoning to visual perception. Current methods, such as latent query alignment, are end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhenyu Lu , Liupeng Li , Jinpeng Wang , Haoqian Kang , Yan Feng , Ke Chen , Yaowei Wang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xudong Zhu , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili , Zhihui Zhu

Despite the growing reasoning capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs), their internal mechanisms during the reasoning process remain underexplored. Prior approaches often rely on human-defined concepts (e.g., overthinking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Shujian Zhang , John Lambert , Wenxuan Zhou , Zhangyang Wang , Mingqing Chen , Andrew Hard , Rajiv Mathews , Lun Wang

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring how interpretable they are remains challenging, with weak consensus about which benchmarks to use. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Gonçalo Paulo , Nora Belrose

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for interpreting and steering the internal representations of large language models (LLMs). However, conventional approaches to analyzing SAEs typically rely solely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dong Shu , Xuansheng Wu , Haiyan Zhao , Mengnan Du , Ninghao Liu

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

We propose a novel method that leverages sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and clustering techniques to analyze the internal token representations of large language models (LLMs) and guide generations in mathematical reasoning tasks. Our approach…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Daniel Zhao , Abhilash Shankarampeta , Lanxiang Hu , Tajana Rosing , Hao Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Shun Wang , Tyler Loakman , Youbo Lei , Yi Liu , Bohao Yang , Yuting Zhao , Dong Yang , Chenghua Lin

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Aashiq Muhamed , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Seonglae Cho , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama

Artificial Text Detection (ATD) is becoming increasingly important with the rise of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite numerous efforts, no single algorithm performs consistently well across different types of unseen text or…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose large language model (LLM) activations into latent features that reveal mechanistic structure. Conventional SAEs train on broad data distributions, forcing a fixed latent budget to capture only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Charles O'Neill , Mudith Jayasekara , Max Kirkby

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yi Jing , Zijun Yao , Hongzhu Guo , Lingxu Ran , Xiaozhi Wang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Large language models (LLMs) encode a diverse range of linguistic features within their latent representations, which can be harnessed to steer their output toward specific target characteristics. In this paper, we modify the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas