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.
arXiv:2603. 21014v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent and process information.
By Florent Draye, Vedant Palit, Abir Harrasse, Tung-Yu Wu, Jiarui Liu, Punya Syon Pandey, Roderick Wu, Chih-Hao Hsu, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
We present a Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) for extracting cross-seed universal features from independently trained BERT models. Cross-seed feature universality is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability: because dictionary learning is non-convex, independently trained networks learn misaligned feature spaces, so apparently identical features may differ by random initialization.
arXiv:2606. 08496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have mitigated the opacity of large language models (LLMs) by decomposing dense representations into sparse features, explaining these features still remains a central challenge.
By Jingyi He, Haiyan Zhao, Ruxue Shi, Yanguang Liu, Xin Wang, Fei Sun, Mengnan Du
arXiv:2606. 04928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse applications, raising critical questions for governance, accountability, and data provenance.
By Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Luca A. Lanzend\"orfer, Kaan Bayraktar, Roger Wattenhofer
arXiv:2606. 07524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a heterogeneous and poorly documented ecosystem, making systematic model comparison increasingly important for provenance auditing, security analysis, and model selection.
By Zirui Wang, Yusen Hou, Shaofeng Liang, Bowen Tian, Yanlin Zhang, Wenshuo Chen, Yutao Yue
arXiv:2607. 22610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model produces a response in a multi-turn conversation, which tokens from prior turns shaped that answer, and how did those dependencies propagate across prior turns?
By Jessica Tang, Shraddha Barke, Sharad Agarwal
arXiv:2508. 17320v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research.
By Yifei Yao, Hanrong Zhang, Mengnan Du
arXiv:2604. 03532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show strong multilingual capabilities, yet reliably controlling the language of their outputs remains difficult.
By Sing Hieng Wong, Hassan Sajjad, A. B. Siddique
arXiv:2606. 04177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpretable linguistic features offer a promising approach for explaining why a given text appears machine-generated, particularly for non-expert users.
By Yassir El Attar, Esra D\"onmez, Maximilian Maurer, Agnieszka Falenska
arXiv:2608. 02879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The widespread adoption of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) accessed strictly through closed APIs has created a critical challenge for responsible deployment: a fundamental lack of interpretability.
By Maryam Rezaee, Pooriya Safaei, Maryam Asgarinezhad, Fatemeh Seyyedsalehi
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