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Related papers: Do Sparse Autoencoders Capture Concept Manifolds?

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Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but often lack interpretability and controllability. This paper introduces a novel approach using sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret and control dense embeddings via the learned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hao Kang , Tevin Wang , Chenyan Xiong

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to interpret foundation models, but their role as an actionable intervention space remains less understood, especially in vision. We study whether sparse visual features can be used not only…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Gerasimos Chatzoudis , Zhuowei Li , Gemma E. Moran , Hao Wang , Dimitris N. Metaxas

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Matthew Levinson

Modern LLMs face inference efficiency challenges due to their scale. To address this, many compression methods have been proposed, such as pruning and quantization. However, the effect of compression on a model's interpretability remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Suchit Gupte , Vishnu Kabir Chhabra , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been applied to large language models and protein language models, but not systematically to electronic health record (EHR) foundation models. We train TopK SAEs on FlatASCEND, a 14.5-million-parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Chris Sainsbury , Feng Dong , Andreas Karwath

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Adam Karvonen , Can Rager , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

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

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…

Understanding how features evolve across layers in deep neural networks is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability, particularly due to polysemanticity and feature superposition. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Nikita Balagansky , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Gavrilov

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 Autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to probe Large Language Models (LLMs) and extract interpretable concepts from their internal representations. These concepts are linear combinations of neuron activations that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Mathis Le Bail , Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Sonia Vanier

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

The rapid advancements in transformer-based language models have revolutionized natural language processing, yet understanding the internal mechanisms of these models remains a significant challenge. This paper explores the application of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Edith Natalia Villegas Garcia , Alessio Ansuini

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

There is a large ongoing scientific effort in mechanistic interpretability to map embeddings and internal representations of AI systems into human-understandable concepts. A key element of this effort is the linear representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Alexander Modell , Patrick Rubin-Delanchy , Nick Whiteley

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

Determining company similarity is a vital task in finance, underpinning risk management, hedging, and portfolio diversification. Practitioners often rely on sector and industry classifications such as SIC and GICS codes to gauge similarity,…

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