arXiv Machine Learning

Model Directions, Not Words: Mechanistic Topic Models Using Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2507. 23220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional topic models are effective at uncovering latent themes in large text collections.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Beyond Top Words: MonoTM for Topic Modeling with Interpretable Monosemantic Features

MonoTM is an interpretable topic modeling framework that separates the estimation of document–topic mixtures from the generation of topic descriptors. It uses sparse autoencoders to extract dense, interpretable features for mixture estimation, then learns topic descriptors from a distinct set of corpus‑grounded semantic features. This approach preserves global topic structure while providing more meaningful, semantic‑unit descriptors than traditional top‑word lists.

By Una Joh, Bei Yu
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Label Semantic Expansion via Label Guided Neural Topic Modeling

The paper introduces Label Semantic Expansion (LSE), a method that enriches sparse label representations by adding descriptive topic words grounded in a corpus. It proposes a Label-Guided Neural Topic Model (LGNTM) that learns label-aligned topics, integrates lexical and document semantics, and maintains consistency between topic and label structures. Experiments show that LSE and LGNTM improve label-topic alignment, label expansion, topic quality, and downstream classification performance.

By Haojia Zheng, Yuyin Lu, Juntian Huang, Fan Ou, Yanghui Rao, Haoran Xie, Fu Lee Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

A Manifold-Aware Topic Modeling Approach via Rank-Based Prototypes

The paper introduces MARETopic, a training‑free framework that identifies topics by selecting rank‑based prototype documents from pretrained embeddings. By projecting embeddings onto a low‑dimensional manifold and building ranked neighborhood lists, a greedy algorithm picks exactly K exemplar texts whose neighborhoods cover the corpus. Two variants—MARETopic_Corr, which uses a query‑performance predictor and rank correlation, and MARETopic_Diff, which employs a rank‑based diffusion matrix—achieve higher purity and NMI on benchmark datasets and run significantly faster, while also improving topic coherence and vocabulary diversity through a novel Maximal Marginal Relevance step.

By Thiago C\'esar Castilho Almeida, Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette
arXiv AI
6d ago

Segment-Level Agentic Topic Modeling for Improved Data Exploration and Resource Efficiency

The paper introduces SeLATM, a framework that improves topic modeling by generating topics at the segment level and refining them through agentic feedback loops. This approach addresses limitations of LLM-based topic assignment methods, such as the inability to produce topic distributions, overly broad or narrow topics, and high resource consumption. Experiments on multiple datasets show that SeLATM reduces LLM resource usage while maintaining superior performance.

By Myeongjun Erik Jang, Antonios Georgiadis, Sae Young Moon, Fran Silavong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 13

SAEVerbalizer: Generating Explanations for Sparse Autoencoder Features via Representation Verbalization

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.