Model Directions, Not Words: Mechanistic Topic Models Using Sparse Autoencoders
arXiv:2507. 23220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional topic models are effective at uncovering latent themes in large text collections.
MonoTM is an interpretable topic modeling framework that separates the estimation of document–topic mixtures from the generation of topic descriptors. It uses sparse autoencoders to extract dense, interpretable features for mixture estimation, then learns topic descriptors from a distinct set of corpus‑grounded semantic features. This approach preserves global topic structure while providing more meaningful, semantic‑unit descriptors than traditional top‑word lists.
arXiv:2507. 23220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional topic models are effective at uncovering latent themes in large text collections.
The paper introduces Label Semantic Expansion (LSE), a method that enriches sparse label representations by adding descriptive topic words grounded in a corpus. It proposes a Label-Guided Neural Topic Model (LGNTM) that learns label-aligned topics, integrates lexical and document semantics, and maintains consistency between topic and label structures. Experiments show that LSE and LGNTM improve label-topic alignment, label expansion, topic quality, and downstream classification performance.
TopiCLEAR is a framework that clusters document or sentence embeddings using adaptive dimensionality reduction to uncover low‑dimensional geometric structures that correspond to human‑interpretable topics. The method is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, showing strong agreement with human annotations, especially for short and informal texts. A Twitter case study demonstrates that TopiCLEAR yields more interpretable topics than LDA, recovering both annotated topic structure and coherent sub‑topics.
arXiv:2602. 17907v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional neural topic models are typically optimized by reconstructing the document's Bag-of-Words (BoW) representations, overlooking contextual information and struggling with data sparsity.
arXiv:2602. 17907v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional neural topic models are typically optimized by reconstructing the document's Bag-of-Words (BoW) representations, overlooking contextual information and struggling with data sparsity.
arXiv:2608. 16269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in neural topic models with pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance by leveraging general-domain pre-training, yet their topic interpretability often degrades on specialized corpora.
arXiv:2512. 10092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analyzing large-scale text corpora is a core challenge in machine learning, crucial for tasks like identifying undesirable model behaviors or biases in training data.
The paper presents an end‑to‑end framework for extracting and clustering trilingual Sri Lankan parliamentary debates in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. Using LLM‑based text extraction, multilingual embeddings, and density‑based clustering, the authors recover 30 macro‑topics with a cluster purity of 0.673. The temporal patterns of these topics align with major national events such as the 2019 Easter attacks and the 2022 economic crisis, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness where traditional LDA fails.
arXiv:2608. 11197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shani et al.
The paper introduces CzechTopic, a human‑annotated benchmark for zero‑shot topic localization in historical Czech documents. It provides topics with manually annotated spans and evaluates models at both document and word levels, using human agreement as the reference. Experiments show wide performance differences among large language models, with the best models approaching human agreement while smaller distilled token‑embedding models remain competitive.
arXiv:2607. 17117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into sparse features, but standard SAEs encode each token independently and do not expose information that persists across a sequence.
arXiv:2510. 16152v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientific literature is increasingly fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, specialized terminology, and potentially sparse keyword systems, making it difficult to capture the evolving structure of modern science.