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Understanding the internal representations of large language models is crucial for ensuring their reliability and safety, with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) emerging as a promising interpretability approach. However, current SAE training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 T. Ed Li , Junyu Ren

EEG foundation models achieve state-of-the-art clinical performance, yet the internal computations driving their predictions remain opaque: a barrier to clinical trust. We apply TopK Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) across three architecturally…

Disentangling model activations into meaningful features is a central problem in interpretability. However, the absence of ground-truth for these features in realistic scenarios makes validating recent approaches, such as sparse dictionary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aleksandar Makelov , George Lange , Neel Nanda

Sparse representations of images are useful in many computer vision applications. Sparse coding with an $l_1$ penalty and a learned linear dictionary requires regularization of the dictionary to prevent a collapse in the $l_1$ norms of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-09 Katrina Evtimova , Yann LeCun

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a predominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, aiming to identify interpretable monosemantic features. However, how does sparse encoding organize the representations of activation vector from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Wenjie Sun , Bingzhe Wu , Zhile Yang , Chengke Wu

Simultaneous feature selection and non-linear function estimation is challenging in modeling, especially in high-dimensional settings where the number of variables exceeds the available sample size. In this article, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-05 Bin Luo , Susan Halabi

Understanding the internal machinations of deep Transformer-based NLP models is more crucial than ever as these models see widespread use in various domains that affect the public at large, such as industry, academia, finance, health. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Dan Pluth , Zachary Nicholas Houghton , Yu Zhou , Vijay K. Gurbani

Regularization has long been utilized to learn sparsity in deep neural network pruning. However, its role is mainly explored in the small penalty strength regime. In this work, we extend its application to a new scenario where the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Huan Wang , Can Qin , Yulun Zhang , Yun Fu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic neural representations, where neurons respond to multiple unrelated concepts, into monosemantic features that capture single, interpretable concepts. However, standard training objectives…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Ali Nasiri-Sarvi , Anh Tien Nguyen , Hassan Rivaz , Dimitris Samaras , Mahdi S. Hosseini

Reward models (RMs) are critical components of alignment pipelines, yet they exhibit biases toward superficial stylistic cues, preferring better-presented responses over semantically superior ones. Existing debiasing methods typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Mengyuan Sun , Zhuohao Yu , Weizheng Gu , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting neural networks by extracting the concepts represented in their activations. However, choosing the size of the SAE dictionary (i.e. number of learned concepts)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Bart Bussmann , Noa Nabeshima , Adam Karvonen , Neel Nanda

Regularization is an effective way to promote the generalization performance of machine learning models. In this paper, we focus on label smoothing, a form of output distribution regularization that prevents overfitting of a neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Weizhi Li , Gautam Dasarathy , Visar Berisha

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) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Charles O'Neill , Christine Ye , Kartheik Iyer , John F. Wu

The linear representation hypothesis states that neural network activations encode high-level concepts as linear mixtures. However, under superposition, this encoding is a projection from a higher-dimensional concept space into a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Vitória Barin Pacela , Shruti Joshi , Isabela Camacho , Simon Lacoste-Julien , David Klindt

Deep neural networks have become very popular in modeling complex nonlinear processes due to their extraordinary ability to fit arbitrary nonlinear functions from data with minimal expert intervention. However, they are almost always…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2023-01-16 Erlend Torje Berg Lundby , Adil Rasheed , Ivar Johan Halvorsen , Jan Tommy Gravdahl

Deep neural networks achieve impressive performance but remain difficult to interpret and control. We present SALVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Latent Vector Editing), a unified "discover, validate, and control" framework that bridges mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Vegard Flovik

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting