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Identifying the features learned by neural networks is a core challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs), which learn a sparse, overcomplete dictionary that reconstructs a network's internal activations, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Dan Braun , Jordan Taylor , Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill , Lee Sharkey

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

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are an interpretability technique aimed at decomposing neural network activations into interpretable units. However, a major bottleneck for SAE development has been the lack of high-quality performance metrics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Adam Karvonen , Can Rager , Samuel Marks , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the features learned by large language models (LLMs). By reconstructing features with sparsely activated networks, SAEs aim to recover complex superposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jingyi Cui , Qi Zhang , Yifei Wang , Yisen Wang

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for interpreting neural network representations by learning sparse, human-interpretable features from dense activations. We investigate whether incorporating variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Zachary Baker , Yuxiao Li

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiangchen Song , Aashiq Muhamed , Yujia Zheng , Lingjing Kong , Zeyu Tang , Mona T. Diab , Virginia Smith , Kun Zhang

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

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract features from LLM internal activations, meant to correspond to interpretable concepts. A core SAE training hyperparameter is L0: how many SAE features should fire per token on average. Existing work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 David Chanin , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become an important tool for analyzing and interpreting the activation space of transformer-based language models (LMs). However, SAEs suffer several shortcomings that diminish their utility and internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Ryosuke Takahashi , Tatsuro Inaba , Kentaro Inui , Benjamin Heinzerling

Predicting protein function from amino acid sequence remains a central challenge in data-scarce (low-$N$) regimes, limiting machine learning-guided protein design when only small amounts of assay-labeled sequence-function data are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Darin Tsui , Kunal Talreja , Amirali Aghazadeh

In this paper we propose Structuring AutoEncoders (SAE). SAEs are neural networks which learn a low dimensional representation of data which are additionally enriched with a desired structure in this low dimensional space. While traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Marco Rudolph , Bastian Wandt , Bodo Rosenhahn

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting language model activations by decomposing them into sparse, interpretable features. A popular approach is the TopK SAE, that uses a fixed number of the most active…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Bart Bussmann , Patrick Leask , Neel Nanda

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) model the activations of a neural network as linear combinations of sparsely occurring directions of variation (latents). The ability of SAEs to reconstruct activations follows scaling laws w.r.t. the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Eric J. Michaud , Liv Gorton , Tom McGrath

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely explaining model performance, resulting in "dark matter":…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Joshua Engels , Logan Riggs , Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose large language model (LLM) activations into latent features that reveal mechanistic structure. Conventional SAEs train on broad data distributions, forcing a fixed latent budget to capture only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Charles O'Neill , Mudith Jayasekara , Max Kirkby

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for learning interpretable features from neural network activations. However, the optimization landscape for SAE training can be challenging due to correlations in the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ashwin Saraswatula , David Klindt

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

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie