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Related papers: Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable …

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We present a method for extracting \emph{monosemantic} neurons, defined as latent dimensions that align with coherent and interpretable concepts, from user and item embeddings in recommender systems. Our approach employs a Sparse…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Dor Arviv , Yehonatan Elisha , Oren Barkan , Noam Koenigstein

Finding human-understandable circuits in language models is a central goal of the field of mechanistic interpretability. We train models to have more understandable circuits by constraining most of their weights to be zeros, so that each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Leo Gao , Achyuta Rajaram , Jacob Coxon , Soham V. Govande , Bowen Baker , Dan Mossing

When scaled to hundreds of billions of parameters, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) achieve remarkable few-shot performance. However, enormous amounts of compute are required for training and applying such big…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Timo Schick , Hinrich Schütze

Many current state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendations are based on transformer architectures. Interpretation and explanation of such black box models is an important research question, as a better understanding of their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Anton Klenitskiy , Konstantin Polev , Daria Denisova , Alexey Vasilev , Dmitry Simakov , Gleb Gusev

Embedding models for entities and relations are extremely useful for recovering missing facts in a knowledge base. Intuitively, a relation can be modeled by a matrix mapping entity vectors. However, relations reside on low dimension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Ryo Takahashi , Ran Tian , Kentaro Inui

Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Mark Muchane , Sean Richardson , Kiho Park , Victor Veitch

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have proven to be powerful tools for interpreting neural networks by decomposing hidden representations into disentangled, interpretable features via sparsity constraints. However, conventional SAEs are…

The standard sparse-autoencoder (SAE) interpretability protocol labels each feature from its top-activating contexts and validates by single-feature steering. We propose the pairwise matrix protocol, co-varying steering coefficient with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Michael A. Riegler , Birk Sebastian Frostelid Torpmann-Hagen

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting the internal representations of CLIP vision encoders, yet existing analyses largely focus on the semantic meaning of individual features. We introduce information…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Yusung Ro , Jaehyun Choi , Junmo Kim

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have been used widely to decompose and interpret neural network activations, especially those of transformer language models. One key issue with SAEs is their inability to directly model multidimensional features.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Collin Francel

Sparse coding in learned dictionaries has been established as a successful approach for signal denoising, source separation and solving inverse problems in general. A dictionary learning method adapts an initial dictionary to a particular…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2012-10-18 Christian D. Sigg , Tomas Dikk , Joachim M. Buhmann

We propose a simple mechanism by which scaling laws emerge from feature learning in multi-layer networks. We study a high-dimensional hierarchical target that is a globally high-degree function, but that can be represented by a combination…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-15 Arie Wortsman-Zurich , Hugo Tabanelli , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro

Hallucinations in large language models are a widespread problem, yet the mechanisms behind whether models will hallucinate are poorly understood, limiting our ability to solve this problem. Using sparse autoencoders as an interpretability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Javier Ferrando , Oscar Obeso , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Neel Nanda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Thomas Fel , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Jacob S. Prince , Matthew Kowal , Victor Boutin , Isabel Papadimitriou , Binxu Wang , Martin Wattenberg , Demba Ba , Talia Konkle

Recent work has found that sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an effective technique for unsupervised discovery of interpretable features in language models' (LMs) activations, by finding sparse, linear reconstructions of LM activations. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Arthur Conmy , Lewis Smith , Tom Lieberum , Vikrant Varma , János Kramár , Rohin Shah , Neel Nanda

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been proposed as an unsupervised approach to learn a decomposition of a model's latent space. This enables useful applications such as steering - influencing the output of a model towards a desired concept -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Dana Arad , Aaron Mueller , Yonatan Belinkov

We provide a series of results for unsupervised learning with autoencoders. Specifically, we study shallow two-layer autoencoder architectures with shared weights. We focus on three generative models for data that are common in statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-18 Thanh V. Nguyen , Raymond K. W. Wong , Chinmay Hegde

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer extensive knowledge across various domains, but they may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, such as personal information in the medical and financial sectors. Machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 YuXuan Wu , Bonaventure F. P. Dossou , Dianbo Liu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a standard tool for mechanistic interpretability in autoregressive large language models (LLMs), enabling researchers to extract sparse, human-interpretable features and intervene on model behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Xu Wang , Bingqing Jiang , Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Lingpeng Kong , Difan Zou

Recent work has proposed that language models perform computation by manipulating one-dimensional representations of concepts ("features") in activation space. In contrast, we explore whether some language model representations may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Joshua Engels , Eric J. Michaud , Isaac Liao , Wes Gurnee , Max Tegmark