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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) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Xudong Zhu , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili , Zhihui Zhu

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

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) have become an important tool in mechanistic interpretability, helping to analyze internal representations in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). By decomposing polysemantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jakub Stępień , Marcin Mazur , Jacek Tabor , Przemysław Spurek

Internal activations of diffusion models encode rich semantic information, but interpreting such representations remains challenging. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in disentangling latent representations, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Boyang Wang , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

Recent work in Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) has enabled the identification and intervention of internal features in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, a persistent challenge lies in linking such internal features to the reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Ruikang Zhang , Shuo Wang , Qi Su

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

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

To truly understand vision models, we must not only interpret their learned features but also validate these interpretations through controlled experiments. While earlier work offers either rich semantics or direct control, few post-hoc…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Samuel Stevens , Wei-Lun Chao , Tanya Berger-Wolf , Yu Su

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for decomposing language model representations into interpretable features. Current interpretation methods infer feature semantics from activation patterns, but overlook that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yiting Liu , Zhi-Hong Deng

Deep learning weather prediction models achieve remarkable predictive skill yet remain largely opaque: we know little about how they represent physical climate phenomena internally. Mechanistic interpretability through Sparse Autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minjong Cheon

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into sparsely activating features, but many SAE features are only interpretable at high activation strengths. To address this issue we propose to use binary sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Lucia Quirke , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

Steering has emerged as a promising approach in controlling large language models (LLMs) without modifying model parameters. However, most existing steering methods rely on large-scale datasets to learn clear behavioral information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anyi Wang , Xuansheng Wu , Dong Shu , Yunpu Ma , Ninghao Liu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs), revealing latent latent features with semantical meaning. This interpretability has also…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-07-11 Haoxiang Guan , Jiyan He , Jie Zhang

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach in language model interpretability, offering unsupervised extraction of sparse features. For interpretability methods to succeed, they must identify abstract features across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Lovis Heindrich , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez , Veronika Thost

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that SAEs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Soham Gadgil , Chris Lin , Su-In Lee

While the activations of neurons in deep neural networks usually do not have a simple human-understandable interpretation, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to transform these activations into a higher-dimensional latent space which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Gonçalo Paulo , Alex Mallen , Caden Juang , Nora Belrose

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have proven effective for extracting monosemantic features from large language models (LLMs), yet these features are typically identified in isolation. However, broad evidence suggests that LLMs capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yifan Luo , Yang Zhan , Jiedong Jiang , Tianyang Liu , Mingrui Wu , Zhennan Zhou , Bin Dong