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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…

Style features such as friendly, helpful, or concise are widely used in prompts to steer the behavior of Large Language Model (LLM) conversational agents, yet their unintended side effects remain poorly understood. In this work, we present…

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…

An unintended consequence of the vast pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the verbatim memorization of fragments of their training data, which may contain sensitive or copyrighted information. In recent years, unlearning has…

We consider the problem of using a factor model we call {\em spike-and-slab sparse coding} (S3C) to learn features for a classification task. The S3C model resembles both the spike-and-slab RBM and sparse coding. Since exact inference in…

Activation steering is a promising technique for controlling LLM behavior by adding semantically meaningful vectors directly into a model's hidden states during inference. It is often framed as a precise, interpretable, and potentially…

Large language models produce rich introspective language when prompted for self-examination, but whether this language reflects internal computation or sophisticated confabulation has remained unclear. We show that self-referential…

Recent advances in explainable machine learning have highlighted the potential of sparse autoencoders in uncovering mono-semantic features in densely encoded embeddings. While most research has focused on Large Language Model (LLM)…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating human-like text, but their output may not be aligned with the user or even produce harmful content. This paper presents a novel approach to detect and…

Large language models excel at complex instructions yet struggle to deviate from their helpful assistant persona, as post-training instills strong priors that resist conflicting instructions. We introduce system prompt strength, a…

Large language models have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to inspect, control, and systematically improve them. This opacity…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in simulating human behaviour and social intelligence. However, they risk perpetuating societal biases, especially when demographic information is involved. We introduce…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in generation tasks but are prone to producing harmful, misleading, or biased content, posing significant ethical and safety concerns. To mitigate such risks, representation…

What latent features are encoded in language model (LM) representations? Recent work on training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle interpretable features in LM representations has shown significant promise. However, evaluating the…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

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…

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…

In zero-resource settings where transcribed speech audio is unavailable, unsupervised feature learning is essential for downstream speech processing tasks. Here we compare two recent methods for frame-level acoustic feature learning. For…

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…