arXiv AI

The Signs Were Always There: Training-Free Concept Detection and Steering in Raw Transformer Dimensions

arXiv:2606. 12629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard basis of transformer hidden states is a training-free, architecture-general feature basis for detecting concepts and, in language models, steering them; with no learned dictionary.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

SignSeek: Learning Transferable Representations for Sign Dictionary Retrieval

SignSeek is a new method for learning transferable sign representations that enables efficient retrieval of signs from dictionaries using only a query video. It employs contrastive learning with saliency‑guided articulator masking, aligning same‑gloss signs across signers while focusing on the single most critical articulator per sign. Trained on 266K samples from multiple sign languages, SignSeek achieves state‑of‑the‑art cross‑corpus retrieval performance and zero‑shot generalisation to unseen British Sign Language, also improving isolated sign recognition and subtitle alignment.

By Sobhan Asasi, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
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 Computation and Language
Sep 10

Contrastive Projection: Reading Transformer Internals by Differencing Logit Lenses

The paper introduces Contrastive Projection, a method that reads a transformer’s internal states by differencing the hidden states of two closely matched prompts and projecting the difference through the unembedding layer. This approach cancels shared components and highlights the distinctions between prompts, effectively revealing steering vectors and domain-to-domain mappings such as metaphor. The technique is training‑free, operates at every position, sub‑layer, and head, and has been validated across multiple architectures and initialization seeds.

By Olli Tuomi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

M3T: Discrete Multi-Modal Motion Tokens for Sign Language Production

M3T introduces a discrete multi‑modal motion token system for sign language production, addressing the need for non‑manual features such as mouthings, eyebrow raises, gaze, and head movements. The approach couples FLAME’s expressive facial space with SMPL‑X body parameters and uses modality‑specific Finite Scalar Quantization VAEs to achieve high face codebook utilization (99.0%). Trained with an autoregressive transformer and a sign‑to‑text translation objective, M3T outperforms existing methods on three standard datasets, notably improving accuracy on NMFs‑CSL from 49.0% to 58.3% without large‑scale pre‑training.

By Alexandre Symeonidis-Herzig, Jianhe Low, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Through the Looking Glass: Directly Reading and Writing Transformers

The paper investigates how many transformer components influence a token prediction by measuring the absolute contribution of each unit and channel to the logit. It finds that thousands of components contribute to a single prediction, yet a small subset—often just dozens—carries the majority of the predictive mass. Across models ranging from 124 M to 7 B parameters, the proportion of the model involved in a prediction remains around one to three percent, independent of size, and the study demonstrates that specific components can be directly read and written to modify model behavior without additional training.

By Mark Oskin