activity
20242026
most citedThe Geometry of Concepts: Sparse Autoencoder Feature Structure

11 citations · 15 across the 11 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

13 papers

cs.LG2026

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

Joshua Engels, Callum McDougall, Bilal Chughtai +11

LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, Diffus…

cs.LG2026

Training on Documents About Monitoring Leads to CoT Obfuscation

Reilly Haskins, Bilal Chughtai, Joshua Engels

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their…

cs.LG2026

Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini

János Kramár, Joshua Engels, Zheng Wang +4

Frontier language model capabilities are improving rapidly. We thus need stronger mitigations against bad actors misusing increasingly powerful systems. Prior work has shown that a…

cs.CL2025

Simple Mechanistic Explanations for Out-Of-Context Reasoning

Atticus Wang, Joshua Engels, Oliver Clive-Griffin +2

Out-of-context reasoning (OOCR) is a phenomenon in which fine-tuned LLMs exhibit surprisingly deep out-of-distribution generalization. Rather than learning shallow heuristics, they…

cs.AI2025

The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities

Yoshua Bengio, Tegan Maharaj, Luke Ong +84

Rapidly improving AI capabilities and autonomy hold significant promise of transformation, but are also driving vigorous debate on how to ensure that AI is safe, i.e., trustworthy,…

cs.LG2025

Dense SAE Latents Are Features, Not Bugs

Xiaoqing Sun, Alessandro Stolfo, Joshua Engels +4

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to extract interpretable features from language models by enforcing a sparsity constraint. Ideally, training an SAE would yield latents that…

cs.AI2025

Scaling Laws For Scalable Oversight

Joshua Engels, David D. Baek, Subhash Kantamneni +1

Scalable oversight, the process by which weaker AI systems supervise stronger ones, has been proposed as a key strategy to control future superintelligent systems. However, it is s…

cs.LG2025

Are Sparse Autoencoders Useful? A Case Study in Sparse Probing

Subhash Kantamneni, Joshua Engels, Senthooran Rajamanoharan +2

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the…

cs.LG2025★ 1 cited

Low-Rank Adapting Models for Sparse Autoencoders

Matthew Chen, Joshua Engels, Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but…

q-bio.NC2024★ 11 cited

The Geometry of Concepts: Sparse Autoencoder Feature Structure

Yuxiao Li, Eric J. Michaud, David D. Baek +3

Sparse autoencoders have recently produced dictionaries of high-dimensional vectors corresponding to the universe of concepts represented by large language models. We find that thi…

cs.LG2024

Decomposing The Dark Matter of Sparse Autoencoders

Joshua Engels, Logan Riggs, Max Tegmark

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising technique for decomposing language model activations into interpretable linear features. However, current SAEs fall short of completely e…

cs.LG2024

Efficient Dictionary Learning with Switch Sparse Autoencoders

Anish Mudide, Joshua Engels, Eric J. Michaud +2

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a recent technique for decomposing neural network activations into human-interpretable features. However, in order for SAEs to identify all features…

cs.LG2024★ 3 cited

Not All Language Model Features Are One-Dimensionally Linear

Joshua Engels, Eric J. Michaud, Isaac Liao +2

Recent work has proposed that language models perform computation by manipulating one-dimensional representations of concepts ("features") in activation space. In contrast, we expl…