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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior reliably remains challenging, especially in open-ended generation settings. This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Zirui He , Mingyu Jin , Bo Shen , Ali Payani , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

Sparse auto-encoders are useful for extracting low-dimensional representations from high-dimensional data. However, their performance degrades sharply when the input noise at test time differs from the noise employed during training. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Nelson Goldenstein , Jeremias Sulam , Yaniv Romano

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 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…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are useful for detecting and steering interpretable features in neural networks, with particular potential for understanding complex multimodal representations. Given their ability to uncover interpretable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vladimir Zaigrajew , Hubert Baniecki , Przemyslaw Biecek

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

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…

Protein language models have revolutionized structure prediction, but their nonlinear nature obscures how sequence representations inform structure prediction. While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a path to interpretability here by…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-13 Nithin Parsan , David J. Yang , John J. Yang

Interpretability is essential for user trust in real-world anomaly detection applications. However, deep learning models, despite their strong performance, often lack transparency. In this work, we study the interpretability of…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) promise a unified approach for mechanistic interpretability, concept discovery, and model steering in LLMs and LVLMs. However, realizing this potential requires learned features to be both interpretable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Akshay Kulkarni , Tsui-Wei Weng , Vivek Narayanaswamy , Shusen Liu , Wesam A. Sakla , Kowshik Thopalli

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for extracting neural network representations by learning a sparse and overcomplete decomposition of the network's internal activations. However, SAEs are traditionally trained considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jeffrey Olmo , Jared Wilson , Max Forsey , Bryce Hepner , Thomas Vin Howe , David Wingate

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

The general-purpose nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a significant challenge for domain-specific applications, often leading to out-of-domain (OOD) interactions that undermine the provider's intent. Existing methods for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Elias Shaheen , Avi Mendelson

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yunpeng Zhou

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

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

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models for learning latent representations. Standard VAEs generate dispersed and unstructured latent spaces by utilizing all dimensions, which limits their interpretability, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Farshad Sangari Abiz , Reshad Hosseini , Babak N. Araabi

A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Constantin Venhoff , Anisoara Calinescu , Philip Torr , Christian Schroeder de Witt