arXiv Machine Learning

Decoder-Preserving Sparse Autoencoders: Which Readouts Survive Sparse Compression?

arXiv:2607. 17425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) compress model activations into sparse codes, but equal reconstruction error and sparsity can preserve different linearly decodable signals.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

Expander Sparse Autoencoders: Parameter-Efficient Dictionaries for Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2607. 01799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose internal activations of neural networks into sparse linear combinations of learned features by fitting an overcomplete dictionary $\mathbf{W}\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ with $m<n$, and inferring a sparse code $\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^n$ from $\mathbf{h}\approx\mathbf{W}\mathbf{x}$.

By Rodrigo Mendoza-Smith
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