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Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dan Braun , Jordan Taylor , Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill , Lee Sharkey

Understanding how different AI models encode the same high-level concepts, such as objects or attributes, remains challenging because each model typically produces its own isolated representation. Existing interpretability methods like…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Ali Nasiri-Sarvi , Hassan Rivaz , Mahdi S. Hosseini

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool for analyzing and interpreting the activation space of transformer-based language models (LMs). However, SAEs suffer several shortcomings that diminish their utility and internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) \citep{bricken2023monosemanticity,gao2024scalingevaluatingsparseautoencoders} rely on dictionary learning to extract interpretable features from neural networks at scale in an unsupervised manner, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Hans Peter , Anders Søgaard

Unsupervised sentence embeddings task aims to convert sentences to semantic vector representations. Most previous works directly use the sentence representations derived from pretrained language models. However, due to the token bias in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Junlong Liu , Xichen Shang , Huawen Feng , Junhao Zheng , Qianli Ma

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…

Transformer architectures have been widely adopted for time series forecasting, yet whether the representational mechanisms that make them powerful in NLP actually engage on time series data remains unexplored. The persistent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alper Yıldırım

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

Predicting protein function from amino acid sequence remains a central challenge in data-scarce (low-$N$) regimes, limiting machine learning-guided protein design when only small amounts of assay-labeled sequence-function data are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Darin Tsui , Kunal Talreja , Amirali Aghazadeh

As large language models (LLMs) grow in scale and capability, understanding their internal mechanisms becomes increasingly critical. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a key tool in mechanistic interpretability, enabling the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jiaming Li , Haoran Ye , Yukun Chen , Xinyue Li , Lei Zhang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Jimmy Chih-Hsien Peng , Min Yang

LLMs increasingly require surgical model editing to enhance domain-specific capabilities without incurring the computational cost or catastrophic forgetting associated with full fine-tuning. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Li Lei , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

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

Recommendation model interpretation aims to reveal the relationships between inputs, model internal representations and outputs to enhance the transparency, interpretability, and trustworthiness of recommendation systems. However, the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jiayin Wang , Xiaoyu Zhang , Weizhi Ma , Zhiqiang Guo , Min Zhang

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract features from LLM internal activations, meant to correspond to interpretable concepts. A core SAE training hyperparameter is L0: how many SAE features should fire per token on average. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to discover sparse and human-interpretable representations of the latent activations of LLMs. However, we would ultimately like to understand the computations performed by LLMs and not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Lucy Farnik , Tim Lawson , Conor Houghton , Laurence Aitchison

We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Eoin Farrell , Yeu-Tong Lau , Arthur Conmy

Artificial neural networks (ANNs), specifically deep learning networks, have often been labeled as black boxes due to the fact that the internal representation of the data is not easily interpretable. In our work, we illustrate that an ANN,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Edward Kim , Connor Onweller , Andrew O'Brien , Kathleen McCoy

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

Despite their impressive performance, generative image models trained on large-scale datasets frequently fail to produce images with seemingly simple concepts -- e.g., human hands or objects appearing in groups of four -- that are…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Matyas Bohacek , Thomas Fel , Maneesh Agrawala , Ekdeep Singh Lubana