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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

The process of tuning the size of the hidden layers for autoencoders has the benefit of providing optimally compressed representations for the input data. However, such hyper-parameter tuning process would take a lot of computation and time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sarthak Ketanbhai Modi , Zi Pong Lim , Yushi Cao , Yupeng Cheng , Yon Shin Teo , Shang-Wei Lin

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for disentangling feature superposition in transformer-based architectures, enabling precise control via activation steering. However, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yunpeng Zhou

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

Even though Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for semi-supervised learning, the reason why they work remains unclear. In fact, the addition of the unsupervised objective is most often vaguely described as a regularization. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Ghazi Felhi , Joseph Leroux , Djamé Seddah

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

To control the behavior of language models, steering methods attempt to ensure that outputs of the model satisfy specific pre-defined properties. Adding steering vectors to the model is a promising method of model control that is easier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Sviatoslav Chalnev , Matthew Siu , Arthur Conmy

We propose a practical method for $L_0$ norm regularization for neural networks: pruning the network during training by encouraging weights to become exactly zero. Such regularization is interesting since (1) it can greatly speed up…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-25 Christos Louizos , Max Welling , Diederik P. Kingma

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) have proven successful in learning dynamical systems in terms of accurately recovering the observed trajectories. While different types of sparsity have been proposed to improve robustness, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Hananeh Aliee , Till Richter , Mikhail Solonin , Ignacio Ibarra , Fabian Theis , Niki Kilbertus

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

This paper presents an algorithm for efficient training of sparse linear models with elastic net regularization. Extending previous work on delayed updates, the new algorithm applies stochastic gradient updates to non-zero features only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-06 Zachary C. Lipton , Charles Elkan

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a powerful dictionary learning technique for decomposing neural network activations, translating the hidden state into human ideas with high semantic value despite no external intervention or guidance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Albert Miao , Chenliang Zhou , Jiawei Zhou , Cengiz Oztireli

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chiraag Kaushik , Davis Barch , Andrea Fanelli

Sparse regression and feature extraction are the cornerstones of knowledge discovery from massive data. Their goal is to discover interpretable and predictive models that provide simple relationships among scientific variables. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Jeremy A. McCulloch , Skyler R. St. Pierre , Kevin Linka , Ellen Kuhl

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They enable scalable approximate posterior inference in latent-variable models using variational inference (VI). A VAE posits a variational family…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Samarth Sinha , Adji B. Dieng

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

Sparse learning is ubiquitous in many machine learning tasks. It aims to regularize the goodness-of-fit objective by adding a penalty term to encode structural constraints on the model parameters. In this paper, we develop a flexible sparse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Yingjie Wang , Mokhtar Z. Alaya , Salim Bouzebda , Xinsheng Liu

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret neural networks by identifying meaningful concepts from their representations. However, do SAEs truly uncover all concepts a model relies on, or are they inherently biased toward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Sai Sumedh R. Hindupur , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Thomas Fel , Demba Ba

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) \citep{bricken2023monosemanticity,gao2024scalingevaluatingsparseautoencoders} rely on dictionary learning to extract interpretable features from neural networks at scale in an unsupervised manner, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Hans Peter , Anders Søgaard