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Transcoders Beat Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretability

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arxiv 2501.18823 v2 pith:XV7NRO3O submitted 2025-01-31 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords transcodersfeaturessaessparseactivationsautoencodersdeepinterpretability
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract human-interpretable features from deep neural networks by transforming their activations into a sparse, higher dimensional latent space, and then reconstructing the activations from these latents. Transcoders are similar to SAEs, but they are trained to reconstruct the output of a component of a deep network given its input. In this work, we compare the features found by transcoders and SAEs trained on the same model and data, finding that transcoder features are significantly more interpretable. We also propose skip transcoders, which add an affine skip connection to the transcoder architecture, and show that these achieve lower reconstruction loss with no effect on interpretability.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Language models represent their current reasoning in a small, readable set of verbalizable vectors (the J-space) that functions like a global workspace.

  2. Making Interpretable Discoveries from Unstructured Data: A High-Dimensional Multiple Hypothesis Testing Approach

    econ.EM 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    A new framework combines AI-derived concept embeddings with high-dimensional selective inference to enable statistically principled, interpretable discovery from unstructured data in empirical economics.

  3. Sealing The Backdoor: Unlearning Adversarial Text Triggers In Diffusion Models Using Knowledge Distillation

    cs.CV 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    SKD-CAG erases adversarial text triggers from diffusion models by distilling the model's own clean outputs through cross-attention guidance, claiming 100% and 93% removal for pixel and style backdoors.

  4. Transcoders for Investigating Deception in Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    Steering 112 manually identified 'deception features' in Qwen3-4B changed whether the model revealed a hidden word, but the same steering test was used to pick the features.

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