arXiv AI By Kenny Peng, Rajiv Movva, Jon Kleinberg, Emma Pierson, Nikhil Garg

Position: Use Sparse Autoencoders to Discover Unknowns

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2506. 23845v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have generated significant excitement, a series of negative results have added to skepticism about their usefulness.

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arXiv AI
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Making Clinical Language Models Auditable: Concept-Guided Fine-Tuning for Robust Prediction

The paper introduces CAST, a concept-guided artifact suppression tuning framework that uses sparse autoencoders to identify and suppress note-specific artifacts in clinical language models. CAST labels latent features with an LLM-assisted pipeline and ICD‑10 constraints, then fine‑tunes the model while providing post‑hoc per‑concept attributions for auditability. In experiments on MIMIC‑IV discharge‑note mortality prediction, CAST outperforms standard fine‑tuned encoders and competes with strong LLM baselines while offering a feature‑level audit trail of clinical concepts and suppressed artifacts.

By Jin Mu, Guanhua Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
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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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
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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.