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Reward models (RMs) are critical components of alignment pipelines, yet they exhibit biases toward superficial stylistic cues, preferring better-presented responses over semantically superior ones. Existing debiasing methods typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Mengyuan Sun , Zhuohao Yu , Weizheng Gu , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit unfaithful behavior, producing a final answer that differs significantly from their internal chain of thought (CoT) reasoning in order to appease the user they are conversing with. In order to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Shikhar Shiromani , Archie Chaudhury , Sri Pranav Kunda

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to extracting features from neural networks, enabling model interpretability as well as causal interventions on model internals. SAEs generate sparse feature representations using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Kola Ayonrinde

Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data. Current methods often rely on costly LLM-based techniques (e.g.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Nick Jiang , Xiaoqing Sun , Lisa Dunlap , Lewis Smith , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs). While several automated evaluation methods exist for SAEs, most rely on external LLMs. In this work, we introduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Alex Gulko , Yusen Peng , Sachin Kumar

Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yifei Yao , Mengnan Du

We propose a sparsity-aware evolutionary (SAE) framework for model merging that involves iterative pruning-merging cycles to act as a novel mutation operator. We incorporate the sparsity constraints into the score function, which steers the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Huan Zhang , Yanjian Zhang , Guillaume Wisniewski , Nadi Tomeh , Bang Liu

Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in user-facing applications, yet they still generate undesirable toxic outputs, including profanity, vulgarity, and derogatory remarks. Although numerous detoxification methods exist, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Agam Goyal , Vedant Rathi , William Yeh , Yian Wang , Yuen Chen , Hari Sundaram

Existing works are dedicated to untangling atomized numerical components (features) from the hidden states of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they typically rely on autoencoders constrained by some training-time regularization on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hakaze Cho , Haolin Yang , Yanshu Li , Brian M. Kurkoski , Naoya Inoue

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become central tools for interpretability, leveraging dictionary learning principles to extract sparse, interpretable features from neural representations whose underlying structure is typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Tao Liang , Mingyang Wan , Guojun Ma , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

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) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Zachary Baker , Yuxiao Li

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (e.g. backtracking, cross-verification) during reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Yi Fang , Wenjie Wang , Mingfeng Xue , Boyi Deng , Fengli Xu , Dayiheng Liu , Fuli Feng

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to extract interpretable features from language models by enforcing a sparsity constraint. Ideally, training an SAE would yield latents that are both sparse and semantically meaningful. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Xiaoqing Sun , Alessandro Stolfo , Joshua Engels , Ben Wu , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Mrinmaya Sachan , Max Tegmark

A recent line of work has shown promise in using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to uncover interpretable features in neural network representations. However, the simple linear-nonlinear encoding mechanism in SAEs limits their ability to perform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Charles O'Neill , Alim Gumran , David Klindt

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiangchen Song , Aashiq Muhamed , Yujia Zheng , Lingjing Kong , Zeyu Tang , Mona T. Diab , Virginia Smith , Kun Zhang