WriteSAE introduces sparse autoencoders with rank-1 matrix atoms for recurrent state updates, allowing replacement tests that outperform deletion on 92.4% of positions and a formula predicting logit changes with R²=0.98.
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Jumping Ahead: Improving Reconstruction Fidelity with JumpReLU Sparse Autoencoders
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abstract
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising unsupervised approach for identifying causally relevant and interpretable linear features in a language model's (LM) activations. To be useful for downstream tasks, SAEs need to decompose LM activations faithfully; yet to be interpretable the decomposition must be sparse -- two objectives that are in tension. In this paper, we introduce JumpReLU SAEs, which achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity at a given sparsity level on Gemma 2 9B activations, compared to other recent advances such as Gated and TopK SAEs. We also show that this improvement does not come at the cost of interpretability through manual and automated interpretability studies. JumpReLU SAEs are a simple modification of vanilla (ReLU) SAEs -- where we replace the ReLU with a discontinuous JumpReLU activation function -- and are similarly efficient to train and run. By utilising straight-through-estimators (STEs) in a principled manner, we show how it is possible to train JumpReLU SAEs effectively despite the discontinuous JumpReLU function introduced in the SAE's forward pass. Similarly, we use STEs to directly train L0 to be sparse, instead of training on proxies such as L1, avoiding problems like shrinkage.
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representative citing papers
SASA replaces single-vector decoders in SAEs with learned subspaces plus block sparsity and nuclear-norm regularization, proving that a single group becomes the global minimizer once block size meets intrinsic dimension and yielding polynomial rather than exponential sample complexity.
Auto-interpretation labels for SAE features generalize poorly across languages and scripts, missing the same semantic content up to 4x more often in Serbian than English and more in Cyrillic than Latin despite deterministic transliteration.
Sparse autoencoders applied to frozen dense retrievers extract Zipfian latent vocabularies that support BM25 scoring and match or exceed the base model's performance on some tasks.
SA-GSAE with Bi-Jump-ReLU enables one latent to encode both polarities of anticorrelated features, Pareto-dominating or matching full-width gated SAEs while reducing dead latents by up to 500x on some LLM hookpoints.
ReSAEs improve multi-layer SAE interventions on Pythia-1.4B and Gemma-2-9B by training later-layer dictionaries on residuals after affine mapping, recovering more cross-entropy loss despite lower raw variance reconstruction.
GAE reduces the faithfulness gap in dictionary-based explainers under distribution shift by geometrically realigning the ID dictionary to the OOD-active subspace, with a quadratic excess-loss bound.
LLM agents have an intrinsic over-calling bias diagnosed via SAE activation margins and corrected by adaptive margin-calibrated steering, improving overall decision accuracy.
SwordBench benchmarks steering methods for concept removal in vision models and shows that linear SVMs achieve strong separability and orthogonality but incur collateral damage, while sparse autoencoders often perform better and no method reaches perfect steering even in simple cases.
fmxcoders improve cross-layer feature recovery in transformers via factorized weights and layer masking, delivering 10-30 point probing F1 gains, 25-50% lower MSE, doubled functional coherence, and 3-13x more coherent latents than standard crosscoders on GPT2-Small, Pythia, and Gemma2 models.
A cross-attention SAE with sparsemax attention achieves lower reconstruction loss and higher-quality concepts than fixed-sparsity baselines by making activation counts data-dependent.
Cross-Layer Transcoders decompose ViT activations into sparse, depth-aware layer contributions that maintain zero-shot accuracy and enable faithful attribution of the final representation.
SAE-NOs extend sparse autoencoders to function spaces via Fourier neural operators with concept and domain sparsity, learning localized patterns more efficiently and generalizing across discretizations on vision data.
DOME learns sample-specific domain variables from sparse supervision via vision-language models and a sparse domain bank to improve test-time adaptation performance.
Sparse autoencoder features in language models do not satisfy joint falsification criteria for unified grammatical violation detectors across linguistic phenomena.
Causal dimensionality kappa of transformer layers grows sub-linearly with SAE width, remains invariant to model scale, and stays constant across depth while attribution thresholds drop sharply.
Re-injecting emotion vectors during recall steepens a model's threat-safety judgments and raises good decision rates from 52% to 80% only when combined with semantic labels, replicating Damasio's somatic marker effect.
Tool identity is linearly readable and steerable in LLMs via mean activation differences, with 77-100% switch accuracy and error prediction from activation gaps.
Tree SAE learns hierarchical feature structures by combining activation coverage with a new reconstruction condition, outperforming prior SAEs on hierarchical pair detection while matching state-of-the-art benchmark performance.
SoftSAE replaces fixed-K sparsity in autoencoders with a learned, input-dependent number of active features via a soft top-k operator.
Graph-motif clustering of SAE features via a frequency-binned WL kernel recovers structural families not captured by decoder cosine similarity or token histograms.
Adaptive elastic net SAEs (AEN-SAEs) mitigate feature starvation in SAEs by combining ℓ2 structural stability with adaptive ℓ1 reweighting, producing a Lipschitz-continuous sparse coding map that recovers global feature support under mild assumptions.
GeoSAE extracts a compact, interpretable feature set from frozen brain MRI foundation models that predicts MCI-to-AD conversion (AUC 0.746) with age-deconfounded annotations and replicates across cohorts.
SAGE uses sparse autoencoders to boost vulnerability signals in LLMs, raising internal SNR 12.7x and delivering up to 318% MCC gains on vulnerability detection benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
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WriteSAE: Sparse Autoencoders for Recurrent State
WriteSAE introduces sparse autoencoders with rank-1 matrix atoms for recurrent state updates, allowing replacement tests that outperform deletion on 92.4% of positions and a formula predicting logit changes with R²=0.98.
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Subspace-Aware Sparse Autoencoders for Effective Mechanistic Interpretability
SASA replaces single-vector decoders in SAEs with learned subspaces plus block sparsity and nuclear-norm regularization, proving that a single group becomes the global minimizer once block size meets intrinsic dimension and yielding polynomial rather than exponential sample complexity.
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How Far Do Auto-Interpretation Labels Generalize: A Controlled Study Across Languages, Scripts, and Rewordings
Auto-interpretation labels for SAE features generalize poorly across languages and scripts, missing the same semantic content up to 4x more often in Serbian than English and more in Cyrillic than Latin despite deterministic transliteration.
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Latent Terms: Dense Retrievers Contain Trivially Extractable BM25-ready Zipfian Vocabularies
Sparse autoencoders applied to frozen dense retrievers extract Zipfian latent vocabularies that support BM25 scoring and match or exceed the base model's performance on some tasks.
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Sign-Aware Gated Sparse Autoencoders: Modeling Anticorrelated Features with Bi-Jump-ReLU Activations
SA-GSAE with Bi-Jump-ReLU enables one latent to encode both polarities of anticorrelated features, Pareto-dominating or matching full-width gated SAEs while reducing dead latents by up to 500x on some LLM hookpoints.
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ReSAE: Residualized Sparse Autoencoders for Multi-Layer Transformer Interventions
ReSAEs improve multi-layer SAE interventions on Pythia-1.4B and Gemma-2-9B by training later-layer dictionaries on residuals after affine mapping, recovering more cross-entropy loss despite lower raw variance reconstruction.
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Geometry-Adaptive Explainer for Faithful Dictionary-Based Interpretability under Distribution Shift
GAE reduces the faithfulness gap in dictionary-based explainers under distribution shift by geometrically realigning the ID dictionary to the OOD-active subspace, with a quadratic excess-loss bound.
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To Call or Not to Call: Diagnosing Intrinsic Over-Calling Bias in LLM Agents
LLM agents have an intrinsic over-calling bias diagnosed via SAE activation margins and corrected by adaptive margin-calibrated steering, improving overall decision accuracy.
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SwordBench: Evaluating Orthogonality of Steering Image Representations
SwordBench benchmarks steering methods for concept removal in vision models and shows that linear SVMs achieve strong separability and orthogonality but incur collateral damage, while sparse autoencoders often perform better and no method reaches perfect steering even in simple cases.
-
fmxcoders: Factorized Masked Crosscoders for Cross-Layer Feature Discovery
fmxcoders improve cross-layer feature recovery in transformers via factorized weights and layer masking, delivering 10-30 point probing F1 gains, 25-50% lower MSE, doubled functional coherence, and 3-13x more coherent latents than standard crosscoders on GPT2-Small, Pythia, and Gemma2 models.
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Improving Sparse Autoencoder with Dynamic Attention
A cross-attention SAE with sparsemax attention achieves lower reconstruction loss and higher-quality concepts than fixed-sparsity baselines by making activation counts data-dependent.
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Can Cross-Layer Transcoders Replace Vision Transformer Activations? An Interpretable Perspective on Vision
Cross-Layer Transcoders decompose ViT activations into sparse, depth-aware layer contributions that maintain zero-shot accuracy and enable faithful attribution of the final representation.
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DOME: Learning Transferable Domain Variables from Sparse Supervision for Test-Time Adaptation
DOME learns sample-specific domain variables from sparse supervision via vision-language models and a sparse domain bank to improve test-time adaptation performance.
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Do Language Models Encode Knowledge of Linguistic Constraint Violations?
Sparse autoencoder features in language models do not satisfy joint falsification criteria for unified grammatical violation detectors across linguistic phenomena.
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Causal Dimensionality of Transformer Representations: Measurement, Scaling, and Layer Structure
Causal dimensionality kappa of transformer layers grows sub-linearly with SAE width, remains invariant to model scale, and stays constant across depth while attribution thresholds drop sharply.
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The Echo Amplifies the Knowledge: Somatic Marker Analogues in Language Models via Emotion Vector Re-Injection
Re-injecting emotion vectors during recall steepens a model's threat-safety judgments and raises good decision rates from 52% to 80% only when combined with semantic labels, replicating Damasio's somatic marker effect.
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Tool Calling is Linearly Readable and Steerable in Language Models
Tool identity is linearly readable and steerable in LLMs via mean activation differences, with 77-100% switch accuracy and error prediction from activation gaps.
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Tree SAE: Learning Hierarchical Feature Structures in Sparse Autoencoders
Tree SAE learns hierarchical feature structures by combining activation coverage with a new reconstruction condition, outperforming prior SAEs on hierarchical pair detection while matching state-of-the-art benchmark performance.
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SoftSAE: Dynamic Top-K Selection for Adaptive Sparse Autoencoders
SoftSAE replaces fixed-K sparsity in autoencoders with a learned, input-dependent number of active features via a soft top-k operator.
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From Token Lists to Graph Motifs: Weisfeiler-Lehman Analysis of Sparse Autoencoder Features
Graph-motif clustering of SAE features via a frequency-binned WL kernel recovers structural families not captured by decoder cosine similarity or token histograms.
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Feature Starvation as Geometric Instability in Sparse Autoencoders
Adaptive elastic net SAEs (AEN-SAEs) mitigate feature starvation in SAEs by combining ℓ2 structural stability with adaptive ℓ1 reweighting, producing a Lipschitz-continuous sparse coding map that recovers global feature support under mild assumptions.
-
GeoSAE: Geometric Prior-Guided Layer-Wise Sparse Autoencoder Annotation of Brain MRI Foundation Models
GeoSAE extracts a compact, interpretable feature set from frozen brain MRI foundation models that predicts MCI-to-AD conversion (AUC 0.746) with age-deconfounded annotations and replicates across cohorts.
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SAGE: Signal-Amplified Guided Embeddings for LLM-based Vulnerability Detection
SAGE uses sparse autoencoders to boost vulnerability signals in LLMs, raising internal SNR 12.7x and delivering up to 318% MCC gains on vulnerability detection benchmarks.
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Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control for Safeguarding Multimodal LLMs
DACO curates a 15,000-concept dictionary from 400K image-caption pairs and uses it to initialize an SAE that enables granular, concept-specific steering of MLLM activations, raising safety scores on MM-SafetyBench and JailBreakV while preserving general capabilities.
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Improving Robustness In Sparse Autoencoders via Masked Regularization
Masked regularization in sparse autoencoders disrupts token co-occurrences to reduce feature absorption, enhance probing, and narrow OOD gaps across architectures and sparsity levels.
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Sparse Autoencoders as a Steering Basis for Phase Synchronization in Graph-Based CFD Surrogates
Sparse autoencoders enable phase synchronization in frozen graph CFD surrogates through Hilbert-identified oscillatory features and SVD-based time-varying rotations.
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Interpretability Without Tradeoffs: Disentangling Polysemanticity At Equal Predictive Performance
ELUDe reorganizes information flow in pretrained vision models to create monosemantic features while guaranteeing identical model outputs and no accuracy loss, without training or labels.
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Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models
The survey organizes mechanistic interpretability techniques into a Locate-Steer-Improve framework to enable actionable improvements in LLM alignment, capability, and efficiency.