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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Eoin Farrell , Yeu-Tong Lau , Arthur Conmy

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained in complex Reinforcement Learning, multi-agent environments, making it difficult to understand how behavior changes over training. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently shown to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 John Yan , Michael Yu , Yuqi Sun , Alexander Duffy , Tyler Marques , Matthew Lyle Olson

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely employed for mechanistic interpretability and model steering. Within this context, steering is by design performed by means of decoding altered SAE intermediate representations. This procedure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Antonio Bărbălau , Cristian Daniel Păduraru , Teodor Poncu , Alexandru Tifrea , Elena Burceanu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but these techniques require many expensive backward passes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Matthew Chen , Joshua Engels , Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Tom Lieberum , Nicolas Sonnerat , Arthur Conmy , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jeremy Budd , Javier Ideami , Benjamin Macdowall Rynne , Keith Duggar , Randall Balestriero

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to optimization-based jailbreak attacks that exploit internal gradient structure. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpretability, their robustness implications remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Ahson Saiyed , Sabrina Sadiekh , Chirag Agarwal

Improving Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) requires benchmarks that can precisely validate architectural innovations. However, current SAE benchmarks on LLMs are often too noisy to differentiate architectural improvements, and current synthetic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

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…

Watermarking LLM-generated text is critical for content attribution and misinformation prevention. However, existing methods compromise text quality, require white-box model access and logit manipulation. These limitations exclude API-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhuohao Yu , Xingru Jiang , Weizheng Gu , Yidong Wang , Qingsong Wen , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

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

Despite their strong performance, Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models suffer from a lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel interpretability framework that leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose previously…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Seongwan Park , Taeklim Kim , Youngjoong Ko

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Claire Tian , Katherine Tian , Nathan Hu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

Model internals encode rich information about how a large language model (LLM) processes its training data; however, post-training data engineering largely relies on external signals and ignores rich intrinsic signals lying in model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yi Jing , Zao Dai , Jinwu Hu , Zijun Yao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li , Xiaozhi Wang