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Sparse Auto-Encoders (SAEs) are commonly employed in mechanistic interpretability to decompose the residual stream into monosemantic SAE latents. Recent work demonstrates that perturbing a model's activations at an early layer results in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Giorgi Giglemiani , Nora Petrova , Chatrik Singh Mangat , Jett Janiak , Stefan Heimersheim

IoT location services accept client-reported GPS coordinates at face value, yet spoofing is trivial with consumer-grade tools. Existing spoofing detectors output a binary decision, forcing system designers to choose between high false-deny…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yoshiyuki Ootani

Mechanistic interpretability strives to explain model behavior in terms of bottom-up primitives. The leading paradigm is to express hidden states as a sparse linear combination of basis vectors, called features. However, this only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Dan Friedman , Adithya Bhaskar , Alexander Wettig , Danqi Chen

Standard statistical learning theory predicts that Large Language Models (LLMs) should overfit because their parameter counts vastly exceed the number of training tokens. Yet, in practice, they generalize robustly. We propose that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay , Asif Ekbal

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) 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

Large language models are increasingly used for vulnerability detection, yet their reliability under different prompt formulations remains uncharacterized. We present PromptAudit, a controlled evaluation framework that isolates prompt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Steffen J. Camarato , Yahya Hmaiti , Mandana Ghadamian , David Mohaisen

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for interpreting neural networks by decomposing their activations into sparse sets of human-interpretable features. Recent work has introduced multiple SAE variants and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anton Korznikov , Andrey Galichin , Alexey Dontsov , Oleg Rogov , Ivan Oseledets , Elena Tutubalina

Insider threat detection is difficult because malicious behavior is rare, irregular, and buried in long periods of inactivity. In enterprise audit data, most windows contain little activity, while attacks appear intermittently and range…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Hayden Beadles , Jericho Cain

Sparse Ising problems can be found in application areas such as logistics, condensed matter physics and training of deep Boltzmann networks, but can be very difficult to tackle with high efficiency and accuracy. This report presents new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Kenneth M. Zick

We present a quantitative evaluation to understand the effect of zero-shot large-language model (LLMs) and prompting uses on chart reading tasks. We asked LLMs to answer 107 visualization questions to compare inference accuracies between…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Kaichun Yang , Jian Chen

Existing code benchmarks measure whether an agent can produce any test that reproduces a known bug, or whether it can produce a patch that fixes a described issue. Neither isolates the distinct skill of property-based testing: deriving a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Lucas Jing , Xinqi Wang , Liao Zhang , Simon S. Du

Large language models are often described as capable of reflective reasoning, yet recursive self-evaluation without external feedback frequently yields reformulation rather than progress. We test this prediction in a cross-provider study of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Bentley DeVilling

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Tom Lieberum , Nicolas Sonnerat , Arthur Conmy , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Neel Nanda

When fine-tuning language models on new tasks, catastrophic forgetting -- performance degradation on previously-learned tasks -- is a ubiquitous problem. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA address this through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Vi Retault , Yohaï-Eliel Berreby

GPT-4 demonstrates high accuracy in medical QA tasks, leading with an accuracy of 86.70%, followed by Med-PaLM 2 at 86.50%. However, around 14% of errors remain. Additionally, current works use GPT-4 to only predict the correct option…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Soumyadeep Roy , Aparup Khatua , Fatemeh Ghoochani , Uwe Hadler , Wolfgang Nejdl , Niloy Ganguly

We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 George Ma , Zhongyuan Liang , Irene Y. Chen , Somayeh Sojoudi

Recent research has focused on weight sparsity in deep neural network training to reduce FLOPs, aiming for improved efficiency (test accuracy w.r.t training FLOPs). However, sparse weight training often compromises accuracy, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Vithursan Thangarasa , Shreyas Saxena , Abhay Gupta , Sean Lie

A key challenge in interpretability is to decompose model activations into meaningful features. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising tool for this task. However, a central problem in evaluating the quality of SAEs is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Constantin Venhoff , Anisoara Calinescu , Philip Torr , Christian Schroeder de Witt

Current open-source prompt-injection detectors converge on two architectural choices: regular-expression pattern matching and fine-tuned transformer classifiers. Both share failure modes that recent work has made concrete. Regular…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Thamilvendhan Munirathinam