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Adam Karvonen

5 accepted papers

2026

Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers

ICML 2026oral

Large language model (LLM) activations are notoriously difficult to understand, with most existing techniques using complex, specialized methods for interpreting them. Recent work has proposed a simpler approach known as LatentQA: training LLMs to directly accept LLM activations as inputs and answer…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Steering Out-of-Distribution Generalization with Concept Ablation Fine-Tuning

ICML 2026poster

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can lead to unintended out-of-distribution generalization. Standard approaches to this problem rely on modifying the training data, for example by adding data that better specify the intended generalization. However, this is not always practical. We introduce…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Learning Multi-Level Features with Matryoshka Sparse Autoencoders

ICML 2025poster

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpreting neural networks by extracting the concepts represented in their activations. However, choosing the size of the SAE dictionary (i.e. number of learned concepts) creates a tension: as dictionary size increases to capture more…

2025

SAEBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Sparse Autoencoders in Language Model Interpretability

ICML 2025poster

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular technique for interpreting language model activations, and there is extensive recent work on improving SAE effectiveness. However, most prior work evaluates progress using unsupervised proxy metrics with unclear practical relevance. We introduce SAEBench, a c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Measuring Progress in Dictionary Learning for Language Model Interpretability with Board Game Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

What latent features are encoded in language model (LM) representations? Recent work on training sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to disentangle interpretable features in LM representations has shown significant promise. However, evaluating the quality of these SAEs is difficult because we lack a ground-t…