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The Universality Hypothesis in large language models (LLMs) claims that different models converge towards similar concept representations in their latent spaces. Providing evidence for this hypothesis would enable researchers to exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Michael Lan , Philip Torr , Austin Meek , Ashkan Khakzar , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

We present Universal Sparse Autoencoders (USAEs), a framework for uncovering and aligning interpretable concepts spanning multiple pretrained deep neural networks. Unlike existing concept-based interpretability methods, which focus on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Harrish Thasarathan , Julian Forsyth , Thomas Fel , Matthew Kowal , Konstantinos G. Derpanis

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used in mechanistic interpretability to project LLM activations onto sparse latent spaces. However, sparsity alone is an imperfect proxy for interpretability, and current training objectives often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Vivek Narayanaswamy , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Wesam Sakla

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, especially with the rise of agent-based systems. However, their safety has received relatively limited attention. Even the latest…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hao Wang , Yiqun Sun , Pengfei Wei , Lawrence B. Hsieh , Daisuke Kawahara

Despite the growing reasoning capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs), their internal mechanisms during the reasoning process remain underexplored. Prior approaches often rely on human-defined concepts (e.g., overthinking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Shujian Zhang , John Lambert , Wenxuan Zhou , Zhangyang Wang , Mingqing Chen , Andrew Hard , Rajiv Mathews , Lun Wang

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) are one of the main methods to interpret the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs), decomposing activations into higher-dimensional features. However, they exhibit critical shortcomings where a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michał Brzozowski , Neo Christopher Chung

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for disentangling feature superposition in transformer-based architectures, enabling precise control via activation steering. However, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yunpeng Zhou

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced substantially, they remain vulnerable to object hallucination caused by language priors and visual information loss. To address this, we propose SAVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Driven…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Sangha Park , Seungryong Yoo , Jisoo Mok , Sungroh Yoon

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jeremy Budd , Javier Ideami , Benjamin Macdowall Rynne , Keith Duggar , Randall Balestriero

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

Responsible deployment of language models requires mechanisms for refusing unsafe prompts while preserving model performance. While most approaches modify model weights through additional training, we explore an alternative: steering model…

Understanding the multilingual mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) provides insight into how they process different languages, yet this remains challenging. Existing studies often focus on individual neurons, but their polysemantic…

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…

We study the challenge of achieving theoretically grounded feature recovery using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) for the interpretation of Large Language Models. Existing SAE training algorithms often lack rigorous mathematical guarantees and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Xuyuan Xiong , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-10 Omar Claflin

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiangchen Song , Aashiq Muhamed , Yujia Zheng , Lingjing Kong , Zeyu Tang , Mona T. Diab , Virginia Smith , Kun Zhang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose \textsc{Mutual Feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Luke Marks , Alasdair Paren , David Krueger , Fazl Barez

While large language models provide strong compositional reasoning, existing reasoning segmentation pipelines fail to transparently connect this reasoning to visual perception. Current methods, such as latent query alignment, are end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhenyu Lu , Liupeng Li , Jinpeng Wang , Haoqian Kang , Yan Feng , Ke Chen , Yaowei Wang