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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 emerged as a powerful unsupervised method for extracting sparse representations from language models, yet scalable training remains a significant challenge. We introduce a suite of 256 SAEs, trained on each…

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool in mechanistic interpretability, helping to analyze internal representations in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). By decomposing polysemantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jakub Stępień , Marcin Mazur , Jacek Tabor , Przemysław Spurek

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

Transformer-based models have become state-of-the-art tools in various machine learning tasks, including time series classification, yet their complexity makes understanding their internal decision-making challenging. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Matīss Kalnāre , Sofoklis Kitharidis , Thomas Bäck , Niki van Stein

Sparse autoencoders provide a promising unsupervised approach for extracting interpretable features from a language model by reconstructing activations from a sparse bottleneck layer. Since language models learn many concepts, autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Leo Gao , Tom Dupré la Tour , Henk Tillman , Gabriel Goh , Rajan Troll , Alec Radford , Ilya Sutskever , Jan Leike , Jeffrey Wu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xuan Yang , Jiayu Liu , Yuhang Lai , Hao Xu , Zhenya Huang , Ning Miao

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

Tensor decomposition is a fundamental tool for analyzing multi-dimensional data by learning low-rank factors to represent high-order interactions. While recent works on temporal tensor decomposition have made significant progress by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Panqi Chen , Lei Cheng , Jianlong Li , Weichang Li , Weiqing Liu , Jiang Bian , Shikai Fang

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a mechanistic interpretability technique that have been used to provide insight into learned concepts within large protein language models. Here, we employ TopK and Ordered SAEs to investigate autoregressive…

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Abhinav Menon , Manish Shrivastava , David Krueger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

It is assumed that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic activations into interpretable linear directions, as long as the activations are composed of sparse linear combinations of underlying features. However, we find that if an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 David Chanin , Tomáš Dulka , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

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

Although sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are crucial for identifying interpretable features in neural networks, it is still challenging to distinguish between real computational patterns and erroneous correlations. We introduce Model-X knockoffs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Tsogt-Ochir Enkhbayar

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

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) aim to disentangle model activations into monosemantic, human-interpretable features. In practice, learned features are often redundant and vary across training runs and sparsity levels, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Cristina P. Martin-Linares , Jonathan P. Ling