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Related papers: Learning Retrieval Models with Sparse Autoencoders

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Large Language Models (LLMs) offer extensive knowledge across various domains, but they may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, such as personal information in the medical and financial sectors. Machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 YuXuan Wu , Bonaventure F. P. Dossou , Dianbo Liu

Steering vectors are a promising approach to control the behaviour of large language models. However, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) may offer a potential method to interpret steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Harry Mayne , Yushi Yang , Adam Mahdi

For large language models (LLMs), sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been shown to decompose intermediate representations that often are not interpretable directly into sparse sums of interpretable features, facilitating better control and…

Sparse autoencoders are usually trained one layer at a time, even though transformer residual stream activations are strongly coupled across depth. This creates a practical problem for multi-layer interventions: different layerwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Prathyush Poduval , Calvin Yeung , Neel Desai , Mohsen Imani

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into interpretable features, but existing methods reveal only which features activate, not which change model outputs when amplified. We introduce Control Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Seonglae Cho , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama

Recent work on sparse autoencoders (SAEs) has shown promise in extracting interpretable features from neural networks and addressing challenges with polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. In this paper, we apply SAEs to the early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Liv Gorton

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Adam Karvonen , Can Rager , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a natural path toward comparable explanations across different representation spaces. However, current SAEs are trained per modality, producing dictionaries whose features are not directly understandable and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Difei Gu , Yunhe Gao , Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zihan Dong , Guoning Zhang , Bangwei Guo , Yang Zhou , Mu Zhou , Dimitris Metaxas

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into sparsely activating features, but many SAE features are only interpretable at high activation strengths. To address this issue we propose to use binary sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Lucia Quirke , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

Vision-language models learn powerful multimodal embeddings, yet their internal semantics remain opaque. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features, they rely on expanding the representation dimension, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Piotr Kubaty , Patryk Marszałek , Łukasz Struski , Adam Wróbel , Jacek Tabor , Marek Śmieja

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Dongsheng Wang , Jinsen Zhang , Dawei Su , Hui Huang

It has been long known that sparsity is an effective inductive bias for learning efficient representation of data in vectors with fixed dimensionality, and it has been explored in many areas of representation learning. Of particular…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Victor Prokhorov , Yingzhen Li , Ehsan Shareghi , Nigel Collier

Sparse autoencoders are a standard tool for uncovering interpretable latent representations in neural networks. Yet, their interpretation depends on the inputs, making their isolated study incomplete. Polynomials offer a solution; they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Thomas Dooms , Ward Gauderis

Latent steering exploits internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide generation, yet interventions on dense states can entangle distinct semantic features. In this paper, we investigate attention query activations as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

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

Developing human understandable interpretation of large language models (LLMs) becomes increasingly critical for their deployment in essential domains. Mechanistic interpretability seeks to mitigate the issues through extracts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yuhang Liu , Erdun Gao , Dong Gong , Anton van den Hengel , Javen Qinfeng Shi

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

Fine-grained steering of language model outputs is essential for safety and reliability. Prompting and finetuning are widely used to achieve these goals, but interpretability researchers have proposed a variety of representation-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Zhengxuan Wu , Aryaman Arora , Atticus Geiger , Zheng Wang , Jing Huang , Dan Jurafsky , Christopher D. Manning , Christopher Potts

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
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