arXiv Machine Learning

Where Decoder Cosine Similarity Fails for SAE Feature Flow Discovery

arXiv:2609. 12591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly adapted through fine-tuning, model editing, and alignment procedures while retaining previously acquired capabilities.

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 Machine Learning
Jul 15

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.

By Mohamed Abdessalem Bal
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 AI
1d ago

Decodability is Not Causality: Dissociating Probe Readouts from Behavioral Drivers via SAE Decomposition

Linear probes can decode safety‑relevant concepts such as truthfulness from language‑model activations, but probe accuracy may reflect only decodability, not causal influence on model behavior. The authors show that probe weight geometry alone cannot identify the features the model actually uses, because geometrically aligned features need not be causally relevant. They introduce a sparse‑autoencoder (SAE) decomposition that ranks features by probe alignment and gradient sensitivity, and demonstrate that ablating shared, probe‑only, and random feature sets reveals a sharp dissociation: shared features drive model output changes far more than probe‑only or random features, confirming that causal relevance requires intervention beyond weight geometry.

By Devesh Tiwari, Camille Davis, Shivank Sinha, Talia Weaver, Aditya Shah, Maheep Chaudhary