arXiv:2606. 30609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to interpret large language models by decomposing activations into sparse, human-understandable features, but scaling to large dictionaries exposes fundamental challenges.
By Haoran Jin, Xiting Wang, Shijie Ren, Hong Xie, Defu Lian
arXiv:2608. 09521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation-based tools are usually tied to one model's native hidden space, requiring probes, sparse autoencoders, and natural-language interpreters to be rebuilt or rediscovered for each new language model.
By Su-Hyeon Kim, Jiwan Mun, Yo-Sub Han
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.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are usually trained on hundreds of millions to billions of activation tokens, but this study shows that the amount of data needed depends on the evaluation metric. Training four SAE architectures on three language models with token budgets from 5 M to 500 M revealed that reconstruction quality can reach near‑full‑data performance with far fewer tokens, while one‑to‑one feature reproducibility continues to improve as more data is used. The research also found that random sampling preserves activation distributions better for reconstruction, whereas diversity‑based sampling can enhance feature interpretability, and provided a theoretical framework distinguishing statistical consistency from the stricter conditions needed for exact feature recovery.
By Sambit Ghosh, Madelyn Mathai, R. Venkatesh Babu, Chirag Agarwal
arXiv:2607. 17117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model activations into sparse features, but standard SAEs encode each token independently and do not expose information that persists across a sequence.
By Haoyan Luo, Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga, Mateja Jamnik
arXiv:2506. 20040v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure.
By Ankur Garg, Xuemin Yu, Hassan Sajjad, Samira Ebrahimi Kahou