Related papers: Feature Rivalry in Sparse Autoencoder Representati…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo and Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization…
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…
We explore and illustrate the concept of ranked sparsity, a phenomenon that often occurs naturally in modeling applications when an expected disparity exists in the quality of information between different feature sets. Its presence can…
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…
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…
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…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been widely used for interpretability of neural networks, but their learned features often vary across seeds and hyperparameter settings. We introduce Ordered Sparse Autoencoders (OSAE), which extend…
Do the features learned by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) represent abstract meaning, or are they tied to how text is written? We investigate this question using Serbian digraphia as a controlled testbed: Serbian is written interchangeably in…
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…
Although sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are crucial for identifying interpretable features in neural networks, it is still challenging to distinguish between real computational patterns and erroneous correlations. We introduce Model-X knockoffs…
LLMs are increasingly being used in healthcare. This promises to free physicians from drudgery, enabling better care to be delivered at scale. But the use of LLMs in this space also brings risks; for example, such models may worsen existing…
In this work, we demonstrate that affine mappings between residual streams of language models is a cheap way to effectively transfer represented features between models. We apply this technique to transfer the weights of Sparse Autoencoders…
Several recent results provide theoretical insights into the phenomena of adversarial examples. Existing results, however, are often limited due to a gap between the simplicity of the models studied and the complexity of those deployed in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…
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…
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…
A common goal of mechanistic interpretability is to decompose the activations of neural networks into features: interpretable properties of the input computed by the model. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for finding these…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) operationalise the linear representation hypothesis: they reconstruct model activations as sparse linear combinations of interpretable dictionary atoms, on the implicit assumption that activation space is well…
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can efficiently identify candidate monosemantic features from pretrained neural networks for galaxy morphology. We demonstrate this on Euclid Q1 images using both supervised (Zoobot) and new self-supervised (MAE)…
Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…