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:2606. 30609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret large language models by decomposing activations into sparse, human-understandable features, but scaling to large dictionaries exposes fundamental challenges.
By Haoran Jin, Xiting Wang, Shijie Ren, Hong Xie, Defu Lian
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: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:2505. 16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features.
By Soham Gadgil, Chris Lin, Su-In Lee
arXiv:2507. 23220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional topic models are effective at uncovering latent themes in large text collections.
By Carolina Zheng, Nicolas Beltran-Velez, Sweta Karlekar, Claudia Shi, Achille Nazaret, Asif Mallik, Amir Feder, David M. Blei
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
arXiv:2506. 20040v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure.
By Ankur Garg, Xuemin Yu, Hassan Sajjad, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
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: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: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.
By Nick Jiang, Xiaoqing Sun, Lisa Dunlap, Lewis Smith, Neel Nanda
arXiv:2608. 11197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shani et al.
By Nikolai Bolik, Lennart St\"opler, Artur Andrzejak