arXiv AI

Sparse but Wrong: Incorrect L0 Leads to Incorrect Features in Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2508. 16560v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract features from LLM internal activations, meant to correspond to interpretable concepts.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

arXiv:2606. 18383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable features from language models (LMs), yet a central question remains: when can an SAE-based explanation be treated as a faithful view of an underlying frozen LM We study this through a post-hoc generalization framework that certifies the LM via a sparse proxy, obtained by replacing a native hidden activation with its pretrained SAE reconstruction.

By Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay, Asif Ekbal