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Sarah Schwettmann

8 accepted papers

2026

Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis

ICML 2026spotlight

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques such as *sparse autoencoders* (SAEs) to decompose the neuron basis into more interpretable uni…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Eliciting Language Model Behaviors with Investigator Agents

ICML 2025poster

Language models exhibit complex, diverse behaviors when prompted with free-form text, making it hard to characterize the space of possible outputs. We study the problem of behavioral elicitation, where the goal is to search for prompts that induce specific target behaviors (e.g., hallucinations, har…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Establishing Best Practices in Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarks

NeurIPS 2025poster

Benchmarks are essential for quantitatively tracking progress in AI. As AI agents become increasingly capable, researchers and practitioners have introduced agentic benchmarks to evaluate agents on complex, real-world tasks. These benchmarks typically measure agent capabilities by evaluating task ou…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

A Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent

ICML 2024poster

This paper describes MAIA, a Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent. MAIA is a system that uses neural models to automate neural model understanding tasks like feature interpretation and failure mode discovery. It equips a pre-trained vision-language model with a set of tools that support itera…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar
2024

Nearest Neighbor Normalization Improves Multimodal Retrieval

EMNLP 2024main

Multimodal models leverage large-scale pretraining to achieve strong but still imperfect performance on tasks such as image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method for correcting errors in trained contrastive image-tex…

2023

FIND: A Function Description Benchmark for Evaluating Interpretability Methods

NeurIPS 2023poster

Labeling neural network submodules with human-legible descriptions is useful for many downstream tasks: such descriptions can surface failures, guide interventions, and perhaps even explain important model behaviors. To date, most mechanistic descriptions of trained networks have involved small mode…

2022

Natural Language Descriptions of Deep Visual Features

ICLR 2022oral

Some neurons in deep networks specialize in recognizing highly specific perceptual, structural, or semantic features of inputs. In computer vision, techniques exist for identifying neurons that respond to individual concept categories like colors, textures, and object classes. But these techniques a…

Cited by 134SourcePDFScholar
2021

Toward a Visual Concept Vocabulary for GAN Latent Space

ICCV 2021poster

A large body of recent work has identified transformations in the latent spaces of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that consistently and interpretably transform generated images. But existing techniques for identifying these transformations rely on either a fixed vocabulary of pre-specified v…

Cited by 19PDFcodeScholar