arXiv Machine Learning By Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay, Asif Ekbal

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

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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.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

When Pruning Meets Interpretability: Preserving Sparse Autoencoder Robustness in LLMs

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret large language models, but their reliability after pruning is unclear. This study shows that pruning’s effect on an SAE is governed by perturbation energy, a covariance-weighted norm, and that magnitude pruning distorts the representation space by ignoring activation geometry. Activation-aware pruning methods such as Wanda and SparseGPT better preserve SAE behavior, and the authors find that middle layers are especially vulnerable, leading them to propose a layer‑wise sparsity allocation that reduces perplexity for a given sparsity level.

By Suchit Gupte, Xueru Zhang, Mohammad Mahdi Khalili