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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used for safety-relevant applications including alignment detection and model steering. These use cases require SAE latents to be as atomic as possible. Each latent should represent a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Matthew Levinson

Understanding how features evolve across layers in deep neural networks is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability, particularly due to polysemanticity and feature superposition. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Nikita Balagansky , Ian Maksimov , Daniil Gavrilov

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

Transformer-based speech language models (SLMs) have significantly improved neural speech recognition and understanding. While existing research has examined how well SLMs encode shallow acoustic and phonetic features, the extent to which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Linyang He , Qiaolin Wang , Xilin Jiang , Nima Mesgarani

Safety alignment -- training large language models (LLMs) to refuse harmful requests while remaining helpful -- is critical for responsible deployment. Prior work established that safety behaviors are governed by low-rank structures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Dianyun Wang , Qingsen Ma , Yuhu Shang , Zhifeng Lu , Zhenbo Xu , Lechen Ning , Huijia Wu , Zhaofeng He

Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) lead to significant breakthroughs in both academia and industry. One question that arises is how we, as humans, can understand their internal neural representations. This paper takes an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Kaichen Zhang , Yifei Shen , Bo Li , Ziwei Liu

Despite their strong performance, Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models suffer from a lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel interpretability framework that leverages Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose previously…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Seongwan Park , Taeklim Kim , Youngjoong Ko

As large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on traditional benchmarks, there is an urgent need for more challenging evaluation frameworks that probe deeper aspects of semantic understanding. We introduce SAGE (Semantic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Samarth Goel , Reagan J. Lee , Kannan Ramchandran

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for adapting large language models, yet the internal representational changes induced by LoRA fine-tuning remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Prasanth K K

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract interpretable features from neural network representations, often under the implicit assumption that concepts correspond to independent linear directions. However, a growing body of…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are one of the main methods to interpret the inner workings of deep neural networks (DNNs), decomposing activations into higher-dimensional features. However, they exhibit critical shortcomings where a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michał Brzozowski , Neo Christopher Chung

Does Large Language Model (LLM) technology suggest a meta-semantic picture i.e. a picture of how words and complex expressions come to have the meaning that they do? One modest approach explores the assumptions that seem to be built into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Jumbly Grindrod

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have become a prevalent tool for interpreting language models' inner workings. However, it is unknown how tightly SAE features correspond to computationally important directions in the model. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Thomas Dooms , Daniel Wilhelm

Despite strong performance in audio perception tasks, large audio-language models (AudioLLMs) remain opaque to interpretation. A major factor behind this lack of interpretability is that individual neurons in these models frequently…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Townim Faisal Chowdhury , Ta Duc Huy , Siqi Pan , Jeremy Stoddard , Zhibin Liao

Sparse auto-encoders (SAEs) have re-emerged as a prominent method for mechanistic interpretability, yet they face two significant challenges: the non-smoothness of the $L_1$ penalty, which hinders reconstruction and scalability, and a lack…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ouns El Harzli , Hugo Wallner , Yoonsoo Nam , Haixuan Xavier Tao

Vision-language models encode images and text in a joint space, minimizing the distance between corresponding image and text pairs. How are language and images organized in this joint space, and how do the models encode meaning and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Isabel Papadimitriou , Huangyuan Su , Thomas Fel , Sham Kakade , Stephanie Gil

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

Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in user-facing applications, yet they still generate undesirable toxic outputs, including profanity, vulgarity, and derogatory remarks. Although numerous detoxification methods exist, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Agam Goyal , Vedant Rathi , William Yeh , Yian Wang , Yuen Chen , Hari Sundaram

As AI models achieve remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, understanding what representations they learn and how they encode concepts has become increasingly important for both scientific progress and trustworthy deployment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yiming Tang , Harshvardhan Saini , Zhaoqian Yao , Zheng Lin , Yizhen Liao , Jingyi Cui , Yisen Wang , Mengnan Du , Dianbo Liu