arXiv Machine Learning By Hendrik Droste, Christian Medeiros Adriano, Kathrin Korte, Holger Giese

Where Decoder Cosine Similarity Fails for SAE Feature Flow Discovery

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arXiv:2609. 12591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly adapted through fine-tuning, model editing, and alignment procedures while retaining previously acquired capabilities.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Sign-Aware Gated Sparse Autoencoders: Modeling Anticorrelated Features with Bi-Jump-ReLU Activations

arXiv:2605. 28149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable features from Large Language Model activations, but standard variants enforce non-negative latents, so a bidirectional semantic axis (e.

By Bartosz Wieciech, Zmnako Awrahman, Marcin Czelej, Victor Hugo Jaramillo Velasquez, Wioletta Stobieniecka
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

From Geometric Recovery to Causal Validation: A Reproducible Audit of Sparse Autoencoder Features, from Superposition Geometry to Causal Inertness

arXiv:2607. 12166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are the standard for decomposing superposed neural representations into interpretable features, and evaluation relies predominantly on correlational recovery metrics -- cosine similarity between ground-truth directions and decoder atoms.

By Mohamed Abdessalem Bal
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Rethinking SAE Evaluation: An Atomic Interpretable Unit Framework Reveals Hidden Polysemanticity and Redundancy

The paper introduces a new framework for evaluating sparse autoencoders (SAEs) by requiring their features to form an atomic interpretable unit basis, a coordinate system for semantically meaningful explanation. It formalizes this objective and organizes existing and new metrics, such as DAME, into a comprehensive benchmarking framework. Experiments across many SAE architectures reveal that some models appear monosemantic under current metrics yet are functionally polysemantic, with dominant features being less interpretable and more redundant.

By Riteng Zhang, Xiaoqian Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

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