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The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques such as \textit{sparse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Aryaman Arora , Zhengxuan Wu , Jacob Steinhardt , Sarah Schwettmann

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…

Decomposing model activations into interpretable components is a key open problem in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for decomposing the internal activations of trained transformers into sparse,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Connor Kissane , Robert Krzyzanowski , Joseph Isaac Bloom , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

The visual world offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models beyond language. Despite growing interest in this direction, the design space for native multimodal models remains opaque. We provide empirical clarity through…

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

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

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

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

With the growing complexity and capability of large language models, a need to understand model reasoning has emerged, often motivated by an underlying goal of controlling and aligning models. While numerous interpretability and steering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Usha Bhalla , Suraj Srinivas , Asma Ghandeharioun , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Deep neural perception and control networks are likely to be a key component of self-driving vehicles. These models need to be explainable - they should provide easy-to-interpret rationales for their behavior - so that passengers, insurance…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-04-03 Jinkyu Kim , John Canny

Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Geewook Kim , Minjoon Seo

In this paper, we present Language Model as Visual Explainer LVX, a systematic approach for interpreting the internal workings of vision models using a tree-structured linguistic explanation, without the need for model training. Central to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Xingyi Yang , Xinchao Wang

Although an object may appear in numerous contexts, we often describe it in a limited number of ways. Language allows us to abstract away visual variation to represent and communicate concepts. Building on this intuition, we propose an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-30 Mohamed El Banani , Karan Desai , Justin Johnson

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

Our understanding of the visual world is centered around various concept axes, characterizing different aspects of visual entities. While different concept axes can be easily specified by language, e.g. color, the exact visual nuances along…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Sharon Lee , Yunzhi Zhang , Shangzhe Wu , Jiajun Wu

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 (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting large language models (LLMs) by decomposing token activations into combinations of human-understandable features. While SAEs provide crucial insights into LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhen Xu , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Kaidi Xu , Tianlong Chen

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) features have become essential tools for mechanistic interpretability research. SAE features are typically characterized by examining their activating examples, which are often "monosemantic" and align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Claire Tian , Katherine Tian , Nathan Hu

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 autoencoders (SAEs) have proven useful in disentangling the opaque activations of neural networks, primarily large language models, into sets of interpretable features. However, adapting them to domains beyond language, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Ege Erdogan , Ana Lucic