arXiv:2606. 02385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have found success parsing neural representations into interpretable concepts, providing a basis for understanding and control.
By William Dorrell
The paper introduces Consistent Sparse Dictionary Learning (ConSDL), a method that replaces the linear encoder in sparse autoencoders with per‑sample sparse coding to improve dictionary learning. Synthetic experiments show ConSDL achieves near‑perfect recovery of dictionaries and coefficients, and in real vision and language tasks it boosts cross‑seed consistency by 17.6% for dictionaries and 35.9% for coefficients compared to six SAE baselines.
By Jinho Choi, Hyesu Lim, Jaegul Choo, Steffen Schneider
The paper argues that the linear representation hypothesis—where neural activations encode concepts as linear mixtures—breaks down under superposition, causing linear decision boundaries to lose linearity after projection. Classical sparse coding with per‑sample inference can recover latent factors, but sparse autoencoders (SAEs) amortise this inference into a fixed encoder, creating a systematic gap that persists across training sizes, latent dimensions, and sparsity levels. Experiments show that the failure of SAEs under out‑of‑distribution compositional shifts stems from poor dictionary learning rather than inference, and that a good dictionary can solve the problem at all tested scales, highlighting scalable dictionary learning as the key open challenge.
By Vit\'oria Barin-Pacela, Shruti Joshi, Isabela Camacho, Simon Lacoste-Julien, David Klindt
arXiv:2509. 10033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse dictionary coding represents signals as linear combinations of a few dictionary atoms.
By Boya Ma, Abram Magner, Maxwell McNeil, Petko Bogdanov
arXiv:2610.07389v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders are widely used to uncover interpretable features in neural networks, yet reliable recovery remains difficult when features overl...
By Hadi Vafaii, Tejas Rao, David Chanin, Thomas Fel, Jacob L. Yates, Bruno Olshausen, David Klindt, Dileep George, Miguel L\'azaro-Gredilla
The paper introduces a dictionary learning framework for probability measure-valued data by embedding measures into Hilbert spaces using features derived from optimal transport geometry. It learns data‑adapted dictionaries through sparse autoencoder parameterizations, yielding fast, scalable representations of probability measures as sparse finite‑dimensional codes. The authors demonstrate the method on hyperspectral images, geometric point clouds, and document embeddings from large language models, and provide generalization bounds and covering number results for optimal transport and entropic transport map dictionaries.
By Brendan Mallery, Shuchin Aeron, James Murphy