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
arXiv:2606. 26620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for decomposing superposed language model representations into sparse and interpretable features.
By XinYang He, Wei Wang, Bing Zhao, Xuan Ren, WenBo Li, WeiXu Qiao, Hu Wei, Lin Qu
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.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret large language models, but their reliability after pruning is unclear. This study shows that pruning’s effect on an SAE is governed by perturbation energy, a covariance-weighted norm, and that magnitude pruning distorts the representation space by ignoring activation geometry. Activation-aware pruning methods such as Wanda and SparseGPT better preserve SAE behavior, and the authors find that middle layers are especially vulnerable, leading them to propose a layer‑wise sparsity allocation that reduces perplexity for a given sparsity level.
By Suchit Gupte, Xueru Zhang, Mohammad Mahdi Khalili
arXiv:2603. 04198v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract human-interpretable features from neural network activations, but their learned features can vary substantially across random seeds and training choices.
By Piotr Jedryszek, Oliver M. Crook
arXiv:2607. 20652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models are thought to exhibit the phenomenon of superposition, representing many more features than dimensions in their residual streams.
By Andrew Mack, Kraig Yuheng Tou, Mark Henry, Zhengxun Wu, Lauren Greenspan
arXiv:2606. 14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK.
By Naiyu Yin, Yue Yu
arXiv:2607. 21291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong generation and reasoning performance, but the Transformer architecture incurs high inference cost.
By Yidu Wu, Xiang Wang, Kejie Zhao, Zhangchi Wang, Qinghai Guo, Xiaoying Tang
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.
By Haoyan Luo, Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga, Mateja Jamnik
SharedSAE demonstrates that a single sparse autoencoder can replace multiple model‑specific SAEs by using a shared dictionary with model‑specific encoder‑decoder pairs. It preserves activation magnitudes, normalizes only selection scores, and supports single‑model inference via model dropout. Trained on four 1B‑scale language models, SharedSAE retains 96.6% of the mean explained variance of dedicated SAEs, shows higher cross‑model latent correlations, and allows efficient adaptation of new models to the shared latent space.
By Daniil Ognev, C\'elian Vasson, Lijie Hu, Kentaro Inui, Benjamin Heinzerling
arXiv:2606. 11722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior.
By Sida Liu, Feijiang Han
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