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Sparse autoencoders are usually trained one layer at a time, even though transformer residual stream activations are strongly coupled across depth. This creates a practical problem for multi-layer interventions: different layerwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Prathyush Poduval , Calvin Yeung , Neel Desai , Mohsen Imani

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Sophie L. Wang , Alex Quach , Nithin Parsan , John J. Yang

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruben Härle , Felix Friedrich , Manuel Brack , Stephan Wäldchen , Björn Deiseroth , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to disentangle the dense, polysemantic internal representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable, monosemantic concepts. However, standard $\ell_1$-regularized SAEs suffer from feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Faris Chaudhry , Keisuke Yano , Anthea Monod

We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ruixuan Deng , Xiaoyang Hu , Miles Gilberti , Shane Storks , Aman Taxali , Mike Angstadt , Chandra Sripada , Joyce Chai

Autoencoders have been used for finding interpretable and disentangled features underlying neural network representations in both image and text domains. While the efficacy and pitfalls of such methods are well-studied in vision, there is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Abhinav Menon , Manish Shrivastava , David Krueger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable feature-level mechanistic interpretability and activation steering in large language models (LLMs), but SAE-based language control remains unreliable in multilingual settings: most SAEs are trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Yusser Al Ghussin , Daniil Gurgurov , Tanja Baeumel , Josef van Genabith , Patrick Schramowski , Simon Ostermann

Deterministically controlling the target generation language of large multilingual language models (LLMs) remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in zero-shot settings where neither explicit language prompts nor fine-tuning are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Cheng-Ting Chou , George Liu , Jessica Sun , Cole Blondin , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose large language model representations into interpretable features, but how these features interact under uncertainty remains poorly understood. We introduce Feature Rivalry -- negatively correlated SAE…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Harshavardhan

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have received considerable recent attention as tools for mechanistic interpretability, showing success at extracting interpretable features even from very large LLMs. However, this research has been largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jeremy Budd , Javier Ideami , Benjamin Macdowall Rynne , Keith Duggar , Randall Balestriero

We describe HypotheSAEs, a general method to hypothesize interpretable relationships between text data (e.g., headlines) and a target variable (e.g., clicks). HypotheSAEs has three steps: (1) train a sparse autoencoder on text embeddings to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Rajiv Movva , Kenny Peng , Nikhil Garg , Jon Kleinberg , Emma Pierson

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) aim to disentangle model activations into monosemantic, human-interpretable features. In practice, learned features are often redundant and vary across training runs and sparsity levels, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Cristina P. Martin-Linares , Jonathan P. Ling

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting neural networks by extracting the concepts represented in their activations. However, choosing the size of the SAE dictionary (i.e. number of learned concepts)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Bart Bussmann , Noa Nabeshima , Adam Karvonen , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a mechanistic interpretability technique that have been used to provide insight into learned concepts within large protein language models. Here, we employ TopK and Ordered SAEs to investigate autoregressive…

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) relies heavily on standardized benchmarks. These benchmarks provide useful aggregated metrics for a given capability, but those aggregated metrics can obscure (i) particular sub-areas where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Matyas Bohacek , Nino Scherrer , Nicholas Dufour , Thomas Leung , Christoph Bregler , Stephanie C. Y. Chan

While large language models provide strong compositional reasoning, existing reasoning segmentation pipelines fail to transparently connect this reasoning to visual perception. Current methods, such as latent query alignment, are end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Zhenyu Lu , Liupeng Li , Jinpeng Wang , Haoqian Kang , Yan Feng , Ke Chen , Yaowei Wang

Sparse Autoencoders have emerged as powerful tools for interpreting the internal representations of Large Language Models, yet they often fail to capture domain-specific features not prevalent in their training corpora. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Nikita Koriagin , Yaroslav Aksenov , Daniil Laptev , Gleb Gerasimov , Nikita Balagansky , Daniil Gavrilov

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable features from Large Language Models, but standard variants enforce non-negativity, forcing separate latents for diametrically opposed concepts (e.g., "pressure too high" vs. "pressure too…

Deep learning weather prediction models achieve remarkable predictive skill yet remain largely opaque: we know little about how they represent physical climate phenomena internally. Mechanistic interpretability through Sparse Autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minjong Cheon

Many current state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendations are based on transformer architectures. Interpretation and explanation of such black box models is an important research question, as a better understanding of their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Anton Klenitskiy , Konstantin Polev , Daria Denisova , Alexey Vasilev , Dmitry Simakov , Gleb Gusev