arXiv Computation and Language

Calibrating Lightweight Sparse Autoencoder Feature Steering

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Information-Theoretic Design of Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering

The paper introduces an information‑theoretic framework for designing sparse autoencoder‑based steering interventions in large language models. It uses the Jensen–Shannon divergence between empirical feature‑firing distributions to quantify how much a state deviates from a target distribution and to construct steering vectors that guide hidden states toward desired firing patterns. Experiments demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in question‑mode generation, show structured downstream effects of local interventions, and apply the framework to safety‑related feature analysis.

By Hirofumi Morise
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 7

SharedSAE: One Feature Dictionary Across Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Sep 10

LLM Layers Immediately Correct Each Other

arXiv:2609.07876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent methods in language model interpretability employ techniques such as sparse autoencoders to decompose residual stream contributions into linea...

By Arjun Patrawala, Jiahai Feng, Erik Jones, Jacob Steinhardt