arXiv Machine Learning

From Geometric Recovery to Causal Validation: A Reproducible Audit of Sparse Autoencoder Features, from Superposition Geometry to Causal Inertness

arXiv:2607. 12166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are the standard for decomposing superposed neural representations into interpretable features, and evaluation relies predominantly on correlational recovery metrics -- cosine similarity between ground-truth directions and decoder atoms.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

From Sparse Features to Trustworthy Proxies: Certifying SAE-Based Interpretability

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 Machine Learning
Aug 4

Sign-Aware Gated Sparse Autoencoders: Modeling Anticorrelated Features with Bi-Jump-ReLU Activations

arXiv:2605. 28149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable features from Large Language Model activations, but standard variants enforce non-negative latents, so a bidirectional semantic axis (e.

By Bartosz Wieciech, Zmnako Awrahman, Marcin Czelej, Victor Hugo Jaramillo Velasquez, Wioletta Stobieniecka
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Causal dictionary learning reveals and validates transcription-factor binding features in genomic language models

arXiv:2607. 19618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Genomic language models achieve strong performance across regulatory-genomics tasks, yet what these models internally represent remains opaque, and the field lacks a principled procedure for verifying that an apparent ``concept'' inside a model is real rather than an artifact of sequence composition.

By Sarwan Ali
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Steering grids for sparse-autoencoder features: when a top-context label names an activation regime rather than a causal axis

arXiv:2605. 03160v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The standard protocol for interpreting sparse-autoencoder (SAE) features labels each feature from its top-activating contexts and validates the label by steering that single feature at a typical magnitude.

By Michael A. Riegler, Birk Sebastian Frostelid Torpmann-Hagen