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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for uncovering interpretable features in large language models (LLMs) through the sparse directions they learn. However, the sheer number of extracted directions makes comprehensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Xinyuan Yan , Shusen Liu , Kowshik Thopalli , Bei Wang

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Hao Kang , Tevin Wang , Chenyan Xiong

Concept unlearning aims to erase a target concept from a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model without retraining. Closed-form methods are attractive in this setting because they apply a single deterministic edit to the cross-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Saemi Moon , Suhyeon Jun , Seoyeon Lee , Dongwoo Kim

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have lately been used to uncover interpretable latent features in large language models. By projecting dense embeddings into a much higher-dimensional and sparse space, learned features become disentangled and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Viktoria Schuster

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Matthew Lyle Olson , Musashi Hinck , Neale Ratzlaff , Changbai Li , Phillip Howard , Vasudev Lal , Shao-Yen Tseng

Recent successes in image generation, model-based reinforcement learning, and text-to-image generation have demonstrated the empirical advantages of discrete latent representations, although the reasons behind their benefits remain unclear.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 David Friede , Christian Reimers , Heiner Stuckenschmidt , Mathias Niepert

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Charles O'Neill , Christine Ye , Kartheik Iyer , John F. Wu

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable results on various image synthesis tasks such as text-to-image generation and image inpainting. However, compared to other generative methods like VAEs and GANs, DPMs lack a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Yipeng Leng , Qiangjuan Huang , Zhiyuan Wang , Yangyang Liu , Haoyu Zhang

Recently there has been an increased interest in unsupervised learning of disentangled representations using the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework. Most of the existing work has focused largely on modifying the variational cost…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-12 Jan Stühmer , Richard E. Turner , Sebastian Nowozin

Despite their impressive performance, generative image models trained on large-scale datasets frequently fail to produce images with seemingly simple concepts -- e.g., human hands or objects appearing in groups of four -- that are…

Graphics · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Matyas Bohacek , Thomas Fel , Maneesh Agrawala , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

A key barrier to interpreting large language models is polysemanticity, where neurons activate for multiple unrelated concepts. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed to mitigate this issue by transforming dense activations into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Moghis Fereidouni , Muhammad Umair Haider , Peizhong Ju , A. B. Siddique

Continual learning studies how models can adapt to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Although a broad spectrum of methods has been proposed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, the field remains predominantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Katarzyna Filus , Kamil Faber , Roberto Corizzo , Christopher Kanan

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

We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Eoin Farrell , Yeu-Tong Lau , Arthur Conmy

Most existing methods for concept unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models minimize a mean squared error (MSE) loss between the denoiser outputs conditioned on a target and an anchor concept, which is implicitly the KL divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Nicola Novello , Federico Fontana , Luigi Cinque , Deniz Gunduz , Andrea M. Tonello

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, the need to selectively remove unwanted knowledge while preserving model utility has become paramount. Recent work has explored sparse autoencoders (SAEs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Tomer Ashuach , Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Martin Tutek , Yonatan Belinkov

Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-21 Xiangyu Liu , Haodi Lei , Yi Liu , Yang Liu , Wei Hu

We introduce Sparse Concept Anchoring, a method that biases latent space to position a targeted subset of concepts while allowing others to self-organize, using only minimal supervision (labels for <0.1% of examples per anchored concept).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sandy Fraser , Patryk Wielopolski

We propose an alternative to sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as a simple and effective unsupervised method for extracting interpretable concepts from neural networks. The core idea is to cluster differences in activations, which we formally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Clément Cornet , Romaric Besançon , Hervé Le Borgne

The Linear Representation Hypothesis asserts that the embeddings learned by neural networks can be understood as linear combinations of features corresponding to high-level concepts. Based on this ansatz, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Chiraag Kaushik , Davis Barch , Andrea Fanelli