arXiv AI

Mechanistic Knobs in LLMs: Retrieving and Steering High-Order Semantic Features via Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Disentangling Steering Vectors

arXiv:2609.07037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a lightweight, inference-time approach to control the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, traditional...

By Takeru Hiramatsu, Kyohei Atarashi, Koh Takeuchi, Hisashi Kashima
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Comparing Latent Concept Formation in State Space Models and Transformers via Sparse Autoencoders

The paper compares latent representations in Selective State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba and Transformers such as Pythia using Sparse Autoencoders. Across a 10‑million token corpus, 99.98% of Mamba features align closely with Pythia’s, supporting the Universality Hypothesis that core semantic representations are similar across architectures. A tiny 0.02% of features diverge, with Mamba’s recurrent bottleneck causing it to compress syntactic anomalies into polysemantic neurons, whereas Pythia’s attention can isolate distinct formatting edge‑cases.

By Rithin Nagaraj, Rupa Laalasa Oruganti, Prerna Subhashchandra Kunder, Ashwini M Joshi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 13

SAEVerbalizer: Generating Explanations for Sparse Autoencoder Features via Representation Verbalization

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are proposed to extract numerous features from large language model (LLM) representations, yet explaining these features still relies primarily on external observation. This reliance leads to superficial explanations inferred from observed model behavior and computational inefficiency from collecting such behavioral evidence at scale.