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:2603. 21014v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent and process information.
By Florent Draye, Vedant Palit, Abir Harrasse, Tung-Yu Wu, Jiarui Liu, Punya Syon Pandey, Roderick Wu, Chih-Hao Hsu, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
We present a Procrustes-conditioned Joint End-to-end Top-K Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) for extracting cross-seed universal features from independently trained BERT models. Cross-seed feature universality is a fundamental challenge in mechanistic interpretability: because dictionary learning is non-convex, independently trained networks learn misaligned feature spaces, so apparently identical features may differ by random initialization.
MURANO is an open‑source framework that enables researchers to design, run, and reproduce mechanistic interpretability experiments on large language models. It unifies the five key stages—loading, recording, attribution, intervention, and evaluation—into composable pipeline steps that exchange named artifacts and use canonical addresses for interoperability. The authors demonstrate the framework with reproductions of existing studies and a sparse autoencoder case study, showing its practical applicability across disciplines.
By Alireza Bayat Makou, Emirhan B\"oge, Phu Gia Hoang, Federico Tiblias, Jingcheng Niu, Subhabrata Dutta, Richard Eckart de Castilho, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2606. 08496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have mitigated the opacity of large language models (LLMs) by decomposing dense representations into sparse features, explaining these features still remains a central challenge.
By Jingyi He, Haiyan Zhao, Ruxue Shi, Yanguang Liu, Xin Wang, Fei Sun, Mengnan Du
arXiv:2606. 04928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse applications, raising critical questions for governance, accountability, and data provenance.
By Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Luca A. Lanzend\"orfer, Kaan Bayraktar, Roger Wattenhofer