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Related papers: Learning Retrieval Models with Sparse Autoencoders

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Large language models (LLMs) encode a diverse range of linguistic features within their latent representations, which can be harnessed to steer their output toward specific target characteristics. In this paper, we modify the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Sparse autoencoders are a promising new approach for decomposing language model activations for interpretation and control. They have been applied successfully to vision transformer image encoders and to small-scale diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Stepan Shabalin , Ayush Panda , Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Abdur Raheem Ali , Yixiong Hao , Arthur Conmy

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a technique for sparse decomposition of neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, current SAEs suffer from feature absorption, where specialized features capture instances of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Elena Tutubalina , Ivan Oseledets

Symbolic regression (SR) aims to discover closed-form mathematical expressions that accurately describe data, offering interpretability and analytical insight beyond standard black-box models. Existing SR methods often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Mansooreh Montazerin , Majd Al Aawar , Antonio Ortega , Ajitesh Srivastava

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to interpreting the internal representations of transformer language models. However, SAEs are usually trained separately on each transformer layer, making it difficult to use them to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Tim Lawson , Lucy Farnik , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

Existing works are dedicated to untangling atomized numerical components (features) from the hidden states of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they typically rely on autoencoders constrained by some training-time regularization on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hakaze Cho , Haolin Yang , Yanshu Li , Brian M. Kurkoski , Naoya Inoue

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular technique for interpreting language model activations, and there is extensive recent work on improving SAE effectiveness. However, most prior work evaluates progress using unsupervised proxy metrics…

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…

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract interpretable features from neural network representations, often under the implicit assumption that concepts correspond to independent linear directions. However, a growing body of…

In recent years, dense retrieval has been the focus of information retrieval (IR) research. While effective, dense retrieval produces uninterpretable dense vectors, and suffers from the drawback of large index size. Learned sparse retrieval…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Zhichao Xu , Aosong Feng , Yijun Tian , Haibo Ding , Lin Lee Cheong

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as pivotal tools for introspection into large language models. SAEs can uncover high-quality, interpretable features at different levels of granularity and enable targeted steering of the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Martin Spišák , Ladislav Peška , Petr Škoda , Vojtěch Vančura , Rodrigo Alves

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Shun Wang , Tyler Loakman , Youbo Lei , Yi Liu , Bohao Yang , Yuting Zhao , Dong Yang , Chenghua Lin

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 have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to inspect, control, and systematically improve them. This opacity…

A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Moghis Fereidouni , Muhammad Umair Haider , Peizhong Ju , A. B. Siddique

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 a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing Large Langage Models (LLM) activations into interpretable latents. However, due to their substantial training cost, most academic research uses open-source SAEs which are only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Patrick Leask , Neel Nanda , Noura Al Moubayed