arXiv:2602. 04718v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A central premise in mechanistic interpretability is that meaningful concepts in language models are represented by linear features in activation space.
By Moritz Miller, Florent Draye, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
arXiv:2608. 10537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have helped uncover mechanistic explanations for LLM behaviours such as reasoning, jailbreaking etc.
By Chuqiao Lin, Shivaji Sondhi, Xiao-Liang Qi
The wide-scale use of sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as interpretability tools is limited by inconsistent links between SAE features and model behavior. Features with clear activation descriptions may have weak or unexpected causal effects; steering can vary across prompts or oppose the intended direction; and activation-based feature selection can miss features that produce the desired output change.
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
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.
arXiv:2607. 24645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The wide-scale use of sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as interpretability tools is limited by inconsistent links between SAE features and model behavior.
By Phu Gia Hoang, Anwoy Chatterjee, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Iryna Gurevych, Subhabrata Dutta