English
Related papers

Related papers: Descriptive Collision in Sparse Autoencoder Auto-I…

200 papers

Recent work on sparse autoencoders (SAEs) has shown promise in extracting interpretable features from neural networks and addressing challenges with polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. In this paper, we apply SAEs to the early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Liv Gorton

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) provide a powerful mechanism for decomposing the dense representations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) into interpretable latent features. We posit that SAEs constitute a natural foundation for Learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Thibault Formal , Maxime Louis , Hervé Dejean , Stéphane Clinchant

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness. Here, we establish a conceptual distinction that reconciles competing narratives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Kenny Peng , Rajiv Movva , Jon Kleinberg , Emma Pierson , Nikhil Garg

Transformer-based CLIP models are widely used for text-image probing and feature extraction, making it relevant to understand the internal mechanisms behind their predictions. While recent works show that Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) yield…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Maximilian Dreyer , Lorenz Hufe , Jim Berend , Thomas Wiegand , Sebastian Lapuschkin , Wojciech Samek

Learning hierarchical features in Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) is essential for capturing the structured nature of real-world data and mitigating issues like feature absorption or splitting. Existing works attempt to identify hierarchical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tue M. Cao , Hoang X. Nhat , Raed Alharbi , Phi Le Nguyen , My T. Thai

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used for interpreting language model activations. A key evaluation metric is the increase in cross-entropy loss between the original model logits and the reconstructed model logits when replacing model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Adam Karvonen

We present the first systematic study of Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) on video representations. Standard SAEs decompose video into interpretable, monosemantic features but destroy temporal coherence: hard TopK selection produces unstable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Atahan Dokme , Sriram Vishwanath

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

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models for learning latent representations. Standard VAEs generate dispersed and unstructured latent spaces by utilizing all dimensions, which limits their interpretability, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Farshad Sangari Abiz , Reshad Hosseini , Babak N. Araabi

While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) successfully extract interpretable features from language models, applying them to audio generation faces unique challenges: audio's dense nature requires compression that obscures semantic meaning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Nathan Paek , Yongyi Zang , Qihui Yang , Randal Leistikow

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)…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-11-13 John F. Wu , Michael Walmsley

Sparse autoencoders are a promising new approach for decomposing language model activations for interpretation and control. They have been applied successfully to vision transformer image encoders and to small-scale diffusion models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Stepan Shabalin , Ayush Panda , Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Abdur Raheem Ali , Yixiong Hao , Arthur Conmy

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

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

We demonstrate that sparse autoencoders can extract interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet, a production-scale language model, addressing the open question of whether dictionary learning methods scale beyond small transformers. We…

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown to find interpretable features in neural networks from polysemantic neurons caused by superposition. Previous work has shown SAEs are an effective tool to extract interpretable features from the early…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Matthew Bozoukov

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) improve interpretability in multimodal models, but it remains unclear whether SAE features form modular, composable units for reasoning-an assumption underlying many intervention-based steering methods. We test…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yunpeng Zhou

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely employed for mechanistic interpretability and model steering. Within this context, steering is by design performed by means of decoding altered SAE intermediate representations. This procedure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Antonio Bărbălau , Cristian Daniel Păduraru , Teodor Poncu , Alexandru Tifrea , Elena Burceanu

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…