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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting large language models (LLMs) by decomposing token activations into combinations of human-understandable features. While SAEs provide crucial insights into LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhen Xu , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Kaidi Xu , Tianlong Chen

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

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

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

Translating the internal representations and computations of models into concepts that humans can understand is a key goal of interpretability. While recent dictionary learning methods such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Usha Bhalla , Alex Oesterling , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio P. Calmon

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) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features represented in frontier models, it will be necessary to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Anish Mudide , Joshua Engels , Eric J. Michaud , Max Tegmark , Christian Schroeder de Witt

In this paper we propose Structuring AutoEncoders (SAE). SAEs are neural networks which learn a low dimensional representation of data which are additionally enriched with a desired structure in this low dimensional space. While traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Marco Rudolph , Bastian Wandt , Bodo Rosenhahn

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potentials for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs), making them a crucial tool for transparent and controllable AI systems. We systematically analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jack Gallifant , Shan Chen , Kuleen Sasse , Hugo Aerts , Thomas Hartvigsen , Danielle S. Bitterman

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret the internal activations of large language models (LLMs) by mapping them to human-interpretable concept representations. While existing evaluations of SAEs focus on metrics such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Aaron J. Li , Suraj Srinivas , Usha Bhalla , Himabindu Lakkaraju

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

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have become a prevalent tool for interpreting language models' inner workings. However, it is unknown how tightly SAE features correspond to computationally important directions in the model. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Thomas Dooms , Daniel Wilhelm

The mechanisms behind multilingual capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been examined using neuron-based or internal-activation-based methods. However, these methods often face challenges such as superposition and layer-wise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Boyi Deng , Yu Wan , Yidan Zhang , Baosong Yang , Fuli Feng

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode factual knowledge within hidden parametric spaces that are difficult to inspect or control. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can decompose hidden activations into more fine-grained, interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan

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

Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Philipp Wesp , Robbie Holland , Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa , Sergios Gatidis

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mateusz Pach , Shyamgopal Karthik , Quentin Bouniot , Serge Belongie , Zeynep Akata