Related papers: Interpretability Transfer from Language to Vision …

To truly understand vision models, we must not only interpret their learned features but also validate these interpretations through controlled experiments. While earlier work offers either rich semantics or direct control, few post-hoc…

Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, their generalization is inconsistent: while these models can perform impressively in some settings, fine-tuned…

The alignment of vision-language representations endows current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with strong multi-modal reasoning capabilities. However, the interpretability of the alignment component remains uninvestigated due to the…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of…

Robust tooling and publicly available pre-trained models have helped drive recent advances in mechanistic interpretability for language models. However, similar progress in vision mechanistic interpretability has been hindered by the lack…

With the integration of image modality, the semantic space of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is more complex than text-only models, making their interpretability more challenging and their alignment less stable, particularly…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to interpret foundation models, but their role as an actionable intervention space remains less understood, especially in vision. We study whether sparse visual features can be used not only…

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful tools for processing and understanding text and images. We study the processing of visual tokens in the language model component of LLaVA, a prominent VLM. Our approach focuses on analyzing the…

Sparse autoencoders are a promising new approach for decomposing language model activations for interpretation and control. They have been applied successfully to vision transformer image encoders and to small-scale diffusion models.…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful technique for extracting human-interpretable features from neural networks activations. Previous works compared different models based on SAE-derived features but those comparisons have…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular tool for interpreting the hidden states of large language models (LLMs). By learning to reconstruct activations from a sparse bottleneck layer, SAEs discover interpretable features from…

Pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) such as DINOv2 and MAE provide generic image features that can be applied to a variety of downstream tasks such as retrieval, classification, and segmentation. However, such representations tend to…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a natural path toward comparable explanations across different representation spaces. However, current SAEs are trained per modality, producing dictionaries whose features are not directly understandable and…

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced substantially, they remain vulnerable to object hallucination caused by language priors and visual information loss. To address this, we propose SAVE (Sparse Autoencoder-Driven…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at identifying and describing objects but often fail at spatial reasoning. We study why VLMs, such as LLaVA, underutilize spatial cues despite having positional encodings and spatially rich vision encoder…

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…

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and transcoders have become important tools for machine learning interpretability. However, measuring how interpretable they are remains challenging, with weak consensus about which benchmarks to use. Most…

Vision foundation models (FMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical imaging. However, they encode information in abstract latent representations that clinicians cannot interrogate or verify. The goal of this study is to…

Sparse Autoencoders uncover thousands of features in vision models, yet explaining these features without requiring human intervention remains an open challenge. While previous work has proposed generating correlation-based explanations…