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Related papers: Are Sparse Autoencoder Benchmarks Reliable?

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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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Alan Chen , Jack Merullo , Alessandro Stolfo , Ellie Pavlick

The cosine similarity between a large language model's hidden activations before and after Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) remains very high. This, at first glance, suggests that SFT leaves the model's activation geometry largely undisturbed.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ruhaan Chopra

Motivated by the hypothesis that neural network representations encode abstract, interpretable features as linearly accessible, approximately orthogonal directions, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a popular tool in interpretability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Valérie Costa , Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Bahareh Tolooshams , Demba Ba

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

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan

Pathology plays an important role in disease diagnosis, treatment decision-making and drug development. Previous works on interpretability for machine learning models on pathology images have revolved around methods such as attention value…

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

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, especially with the rise of agent-based systems. However, their safety has received relatively limited attention. Even the latest…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hao Wang , Yiqun Sun , Pengfei Wei , Lawrence B. Hsieh , Daisuke Kawahara

Recent interpretability work on large language models (LLMs) has been increasingly dominated by a feature-discovery approach with the help of proxy modules. Then, the quality of features learned by, e.g., sparse auto-encoders (SAEs), is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mengyu Ye , Jun Suzuki , Tatsuro Inaba , Tatsuki Kuribayashi

Speech holds promise as a cost-effective and non-invasive biomarker for neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease (PD). While deep learning systems trained on raw audio can find subtle signals not available from hand-crafted…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-24 Peter Plantinga , Jen-Kai Chen , Roozbeh Sattari , Mirco Ravanelli , Denise Klein

Instruction tuning data are often quantity-saturated due to the large volume of data collection and fast model iteration, leaving data selection important but underexplored. Existing quality-driven data selection methods, such as LIMA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Xianjun Yang , Shaoliang Nie , Lijuan Liu , Suchin Gururangan , Ujjwal Karn , Rui Hou , Madian Khabsa , Yuning Mao

Watermarking LLM-generated text is critical for content attribution and misinformation prevention. However, existing methods compromise text quality, require white-box model access and logit manipulation. These limitations exclude API-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhuohao Yu , Xingru Jiang , Weizheng Gu , Yidong Wang , Qingsong Wen , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zirui He , Haiyan Zhao , Yiran Qiao , Fan Yang , Ali Payani , Jing Ma , Mengnan Du

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) interpret neural network representations by decomposing activations into sparse combinations of dictionary atoms. However, SAEs assume features combine additively through linear reconstruction, an assumption that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Panagiotis Koromilas , Andreas D. Demou , James Oldfield , Yannis Panagakis , Mihalis Nicolaou

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can extract interpretable features from large language models (LLMs) without supervision. However, their effectiveness in downstream steering tasks is limited by the requirement for contrastive datasets or large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Seonglae Cho , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama

Modern text classification methods heavily rely on contextual embeddings from large language models (LLMs). Compared to human-engineered features, these embeddings provide automatic and effective representations for classification model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Xuansheng Wu , Wenhao Yu , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu

Recommendation model interpretation aims to reveal the relationships between inputs, model internal representations and outputs to enhance the transparency, interpretability, and trustworthiness of recommendation systems. However, the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jiayin Wang , Xiaoyu Zhang , Weizhi Ma , Zhiqiang Guo , Min Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) excel at handling human queries, but they can occasionally generate flawed or unexpected responses. Understanding their internal states is crucial for understanding their successes, diagnosing their failures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xuansheng Wu , Jiayi Yuan , Wenlin Yao , Xiaoming Zhai , Ninghao Liu