REVIEW 4 major objections 4 minor 99 references
Multimodal Model Diffing for Feature Discovery and Control
T0 review · 4 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-11 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Adding vision to a language model rewrites a small set of internal features, and those rewritten features act as specific control handles: removing one degrades a targeted skill while general question answering is left intact.
desk verdict A new diffing pipeline with careful controls, but the headline effect sizes are best-of-feature numbers on feature-selected subsets and need to be reported as such. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central object is the MMDiff pipeline, a three-stage filter that turns two SAE dictionaries into control handles. The load-bearing pieces are: (i) a text-only warm-started SAE trained on the frozen MLLM's text-token activations, which preserves the base-LM feature basis so that same-index feature comparisons stay meaningful; (ii) the adapted-feature filter, defined by visual energy $E_v(f)$ above a threshold together with decoder cosine $c_f$ in the bottom 25%, which isolates the roughly 5–20% of features that multimodal training actually rewrote; (iii) per-token contrastive firing screened by a Fisher exact test (odds ratio $\geq 3$, firing-frequency gap $\Delta p \geq 0.05$) plus a neutral-prompt lexical-invariance filter, which extracts the task-specific subset; and (iv) two intervention primitives — three-point all-layer orthogonal projection for causal removal, and MMDiff-CAA steering, which injects the feature's decoder direction at its feature-associated layer alongside multi-layer CAA directions.
What would settle it
Ablate the same discovered spatial and OCR features but score on the complete VSR and OCRBench benchmarks instead of the per-feature top-activating subsets; if the average deltas collapse toward zero, or concentrate on a handful of near-duplicate niche samples, the selectivity claim is an artifact of the evaluation subsets. A complementary check steers a feature selected on one spatial dataset and tests it on a different spatial benchmark the feature never saw, which would reveal whether the feature encodes the behavior or the dataset.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The paper claims that the difference between a base language model's feature dictionary and its multimodal-adapted counterpart is the right discovery signal for multimodal behavior. MMDiff warm-starts a multimodal SAE from the base-LM SAE, then selects features whose decoder directions rotate most under adaptation (bottom quartile of cosine similarity) while becoming visually responsive (positive visual energy), and further narrows this adapted set by per-token contrastive firing between a target distribution — spatial, OCR, or unsafe prompts — and a generic VQA baseline, followed by a lexical-invariance filter. The surviving sets are sparse: roughly 700 to 1,400 features out of dictionaries of hundreds of thousands to a million. Projecting a single discovered direction out of the residual stream at text-token positions degrades the target behavior by 6–31% per feature across three model families (means of −10.1, −12.3 and −14.6% on spatial tasks, −16.9% on OCR), with VQA spillover at or below 1.5%; safety features cut attack success by 17–28% per category with no measurable cost on benign controls. Steering the same directions together with multi-layer contrastive activation addition improves over vanilla single-layer steering, supporting the paper's conclusion that multimodal SAEs can function as control interfaces, not merely interpretability tools.
Load-bearing premise
The causal-effect numbers assume that a feature's importance on the samples where it fires hardest measures its importance for the whole behavior, because the headline 12% and 17% averages are computed on per-feature subsets built from each feature's top-activating samples rather than on the full benchmarks.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- A single sparse feature direction can carry substantial causal weight for a specific behavior: per-feature removal drops spatial accuracy by 6–31% and OCR category accuracy by up to 28%, with $|\Delta\mathrm{VQA}| \leq 1.5\%$ across all three model families.
- Safety features found by contrastive firing reduce VLSBench attack success rate by 17–28% per category, with a mean of −9.67% over 1,061 candidates and essentially unchanged benign controls, offering a feature-level defense handle against image-grounded jailbreaks.
- Cross-stage ablation on PaliGemma 2 shows spatial feature effects amplify roughly 3× after instruction tuning, and two features reverse sign, indicating that these spatial behaviors are acquired during multimodal fine-tuning rather than inherited from the pretrained model.
- MMDiff-CAA's steering gain decomposes into comparable contributions from moving CAA to the feature's discovered layers (+1.82) and injecting the feature's decoder direction (+1.81) on top of vanilla single-layer CAA (+8.96).
- Only the target distribution changes between applications, so the same recipe can be pointed at new behaviors and new MLLM families without per-domain retuning, as the paper itself argues in its conclusion.
Reading between the lines
- The paper reports deltas on per-feature subsets built from each feature's top-activating samples; measured on complete VSR and OCRBench, the average effect is likely smaller, so a deployment-grade estimate of control strength should re-run the ablations on the full benchmarks. This is an editorial inference about the evaluation protocol, not a paper claim.
- The attribution-patching result — driving attention heads cluster near a feature's home layer — suggests a mechanistic explanation for why layer-targeted steering works, and implies a testable predictor: features whose driving heads are more tightly co-located with the feature's home layer should steer more effectively.
- The diffing recipe does not depend on the LM-to-MLLM transition being special; applying the same diff across other adjacent training stages (base to instruction-tuned, instruction-tuned to safety-tuned) would localize when each behavior is acquired, turning MMDiff into a training-stage audit tool.
- Image counterfactuals show OCR features lose 36.8% of activation when the image is blanked; the natural stress test is whether the safety features survive adversarially constructed images, or whether attackers can re-elicit unsafe behavior through features outside the adapted set.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript introduces MMDiff, a pipeline that trains multimodal SAEs warm-started from base-LM SAEs, identifies features whose decoder directions rotate and that prefer visual input, and then applies per-token contrastive firing analysis to isolate task-specific features for spatial reasoning, multimodal safety, and OCR. The discovered features are intervened on by projection ablation and by a combined multi-layer CAA plus decoder-direction steering method, evaluated across LLaVA-MORE, PaliGemma 2, and InternVL3.5-2B. The central claims are that feature-level removal selectively degrades target behaviors by 12% on spatial tasks and 17% on OCR, reduces attack success rate by 24% on multimodal safety attacks, and that steering improves spatial and OCR accuracy over a single-layer CAA baseline.
Significance. If the headline results held at the level claimed, MMDiff would be a valuable contribution: it combines model diffing with SAE-based feature discovery for MLLMs, and it provides feature-level handles for both causal analysis and control. The paper has notable strengths, including multiple control conditions (random-feature ablation, a from-scratch SAE control, VQA spillover checks, and benign control sets), a cross-stage ablation on pretrained versus instruction-tuned checkpoints, image-counterfactual diagnostics, and explicit matching checks for feature correspondence across dictionaries. These controls support the qualitative conclusion that the diffing-based selection carries information beyond random or from-scratch alternatives. However, the headline causal-effect sizes are computed on outcome-ranked top features evaluated on feature-specific subsets, so the reported magnitudes do not yet support the benchmark-level selectivity claims made in the abstract.
major comments (4)
- [§5.1, Table 1; Abstract] The abstract's "average of 12% on spatial tasks" is not an average over MMDiff-discovered features on a full spatial benchmark. It is the mean over the top ten features per model ranked by ΔVSR, and each feature is scored on a VSR subset constructed from that feature's top-activating samples. This is a best-of-feature effect on feature-specific subsets, so the claimed "selectively degrades target behaviors" is substantially weaker than the headline suggests. Please report the mean ablation effect over the full discovered feature set and on the full VSR benchmark, and qualify the abstract accordingly.
- [§5.2, Table 4; Abstract] The "24% reduction in attack success rate" reported in the abstract and introduction is the mean over the single best feature per VLSBench category, whereas the same section reports a mean ΔASR of −9.67% over the full sweep of 1,061 candidate safety features. Both numbers appear in the text, but the headline selects the per-category best-case figure. The abstract should report the full-sweep mean, or at minimum present the 24% figure explicitly as the per-category top-feature result.
- [§5.3, Tables 5–6] The OCR results are based on five features, with ΔCat measured on each feature's own OCRBench category subset and steering gains measured on the same five features. The means of −16.9% for ablation and +1.8% for steering are therefore small-sample, feature-specific-subset numbers rather than full-benchmark results. To support the benchmark-level claim, the paper should report full OCRBench ablation results and the distribution of effects over the 1,070 discovered OCR-selective features.
- [§3.3, §5.1] The selection procedure uses the target distribution: features are retained because they fire more on D_tgt than on D_base, and the causal effect is then measured on subsets or categories of the same target distribution. This creates a structural correlation between selection and evaluation that inflates effect sizes. The random-feature and from-scratch-SAE controls show that selection beats chance, but they do not quantify the gap between top-feature/subset effects and all-feature/benchmark effects. I request an evaluation of the selected features on a held-out full benchmark and a report of the effect distribution over the whole discovered set.
minor comments (4)
- [§3.2] The main text does not give the numerical values of the visual-energy threshold ε and the cosine percentile pcos; they appear only in appendix figures. Please state the chosen values in the main text for reproducibility.
- [§5.1, Table 1 caption] The caption describes the features as "Top spatial SAE features ranked by ΔVSR." It should clarify whether this ranking is part of the MMDiff discovery pipeline or a post hoc outcome-based selection, since outcome-based ranking can inflate the reported deltas.
- [Table 3] The sentence "Non-improvements correspond to features already strongly encoded before fine-tuning or resistant to amplification" is a post hoc explanation without supporting evidence; please either provide data for it or remove it.
- [§8] The limitation that safety and OCR are evaluated on PaliGemma 2 only should be reflected in the abstract and introduction, which currently present the results with cross-model generality.
Circularity Check
Core diffing pipeline is self-contained, but the headline causal-effect averages are outcome-ranked and subset-selected, inflating the reported 12%/17%/24% figures.
-
fitted input called prediction
[Sec. 5.1, Table 1 caption and evaluation protocol; Abstract]
"Top spatial SAE features ranked by ∆VSR; ... Ablating top spatial features lowers VSR accuracy by 6–31%, with means of −10.1, −12.3 and −14.6% ... each feature is scored on a VSR subset constructed from its top-activating samples"
The abstract's "average of 12% on spatial tasks" is the mean of Table 1's ΔVSR column, and the rows of that column are selected by ranking on ΔVSR itself. Averaging the top-k values of the outcome variable guarantees a large negative mean even if most MMDiff features have small or zero causal effects. In addition, each feature is evaluated on a VSR subset built from its own top-activating samples, so the "target behavior" is defined by the feature's firing distribution; removing the feature from the residual stream then changes that subset almost by construction. The ΔVQA and ΔCtrl controls show no spillover, but they do not quantify the gap between top-feature/subset effects and typical-feature/full-benchmark effects.
-
fitted input called prediction
[Sec. 5.2, Table 4 and sweep paragraph; Abstract]
"for each of the six VLSBench categories we identify the top unsafe feature in the adapted set A and ablate it. ... Each top feature reduces VLSBench ASR by 17–28% ... Across a sweep of 1,061 candidate safety features, the mean effect is ∆ASR = −9.67 %"
The abstract's 24% ASR reduction is the average of the six per-category top-feature deltas in Table 4, i.e., the best feature within each category selected after seeing the effect. The paper discloses that the mean over all 1,061 safety candidates is only −9.67%, so the 24% headline is a selected-extreme statistic, not the typical MMDiff safety feature's effect. Since the selection criterion (per-category ASR drop) is the same variable being summarized, the headline number is statistically forced by the choice of top features.
full rationale
The MMDiff derivation chain—warm-started SAE adaptation, adapted-feature filter (visual energy + decoder rotation), contrastive firing against a generic VQAv2 baseline, lexical-invariance filtering, and downstream causal removal/steering—does not reduce to its inputs. The random-feature control (ΔVSR −0.5), from-scratch SAE control (+0.22), ΔVQA/ΔCtrl controls, cross-stage ablation, and steering decomposition provide independent grounding; self-citations such as [83] are not load-bearing because the paper reports its own FVU and decoder-cosine measurements. The partial circularity is confined to how the headline effect sizes are aggregated: Table 1's spatial means are averages over rows selected by ranking on ΔVSR itself, and each feature is evaluated on a VSR subset built from its own top activations, so the 12% abstract figure is an order statistic of the outcome variable rather than a typical discovered feature's effect; the same applies to the 17% OCR mean over five top features. For safety, the 24% abstract figure is the mean of per-category top features while the disclosed full-sweep mean is −9.67%, so the headline is a best-case selection. Because the paper discloses the selection in table captions and the safety sweep mean, and because the discovery pipeline has independent controls, this is a partial circularity in the strength of the headline claims, not a collapse of the derivation.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (6)
- Visual energy threshold ε =
0.01 (MMDiff-Gemma); otherwise unspecified
- Decoder cosine percentile pcos =
25% (bottom quartile)
- Odds ratio threshold τ_OR =
3
- Firing frequency gap threshold τ_Δp =
0.05
- Lexical filter activation cutoff η =
0.01
- Steering strengths α and γf =
α unspecified; γf in {1, 3, 10}
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption Text-only SAE training preserves base-LM feature identity sufficiently for index-aligned diffing.
- ad hoc to paper Decoder cosine and visual energy jointly define features 'altered by multimodal training'.
- ad hoc to paper Per-feature evaluation subsets built from top-activating samples measure a feature's true causal contribution to the target behavior.
- domain assumption Three-point all-layers projection ablation is a faithful causal intervention on the residual stream.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Multimodal Model Diffing for Feature Discovery and Control." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/P25W5XUJ
@misc{pith2026260809928,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Multimodal Model Diffing for Feature Discovery and Control},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/P25W5XUJ}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2608.09928}
}
read the original abstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong visual understanding, yet the internal features that cause these behaviors remain difficult to identify, audit, or control. While applicable to post-hoc inspection, hidden states that are decomposed into interpretable feature directions using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) neither readily isolate which features are changed by multimodal training, nor are they directly useful for targeted control. We introduce MMDiff, a multimodal model-diffing framework that trains multimodal SAEs and turns them into feature-level interfaces for discovering and controlling multimodal behavior. MMDiff supports three uses: (i) feature isolation, by diffing a base-LM SAE against its multimodal-adapted counterpart to identify features altered by multimodal training; (ii) task-specific feature detection, via per-token contrastive firing analysis that isolates causal features; and (iii) feature-level control, by causally removing or steering the discovered feature directions. We train multimodal SAEs for three MLLM families, LLaVA-MORE, PaliGemma 2, and InternVL3.5, and evaluate on visual-spatial understanding, multimodal safety, and OCR. MMDiff discovers sparse, causally specific features whose removal selectively degrades target behaviors by an average of 12% on spatial tasks and 17% on OCR, and reduces attack success rate by 24% on multimodal safety attacks, with no impact on VQA performance. Steering these features improves spatial and OCR accuracy by +3.6% and +1.8% on average over a standard single-layer steering baseline. These results show that multimodal SAEs can serve not only as interpretability tools, but as mechanisms for auditing, steering, and controlling MLLMs behavior toward safer and more capable generations.
Figures
Figures from the paper (20 more)
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Pixtral 12b: A new frontier in image and text understanding
Mistral AI. Pixtral 12b: A new frontier in image and text understanding. https://mistral. ai/news/pixtral-12b/, September 2024. Accessed: 2024-12-21
2024
-
[2]
Golden gate Claude
Anthropic. Golden gate Claude. https://www.anthropic.com/news/ golden-gate-claude, May 2024
2024
-
[3]
SAE on activation differences
Santiago Aranguri, Jacob Drori, and Neel Nanda. SAE on activation differences. AI Align- ment Forum, 2025. https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/XPNJSa3BxMAN4ZXc7/ sae-on-activation-differences
2025
-
[4]
Refusal in language models is mediated by a single direction
Andy Arditi, Oscar Obeso, Aaquib Syed, Daniel Paleka, Nina Panickssery, Wes Gurnee, and Neel Nanda. Refusal in language models is mediated by a single direction. InAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024. arXiv:2406.11717
arXiv 2024
-
[5]
Revisiting model stitching to compare neural representations.Advances in neural information processing systems, 34:225–236, 2021
Yamini Bansal, Preetum Nakkiran, and Boaz Barak. Revisiting model stitching to compare neural representations.Advances in neural information processing systems, 34:225–236, 2021
2021
-
[6]
Serguei Barannikov, Ilya Trofimov, Nikita Balabin, and Evgeny Burnaev. Representation topology divergence: A method for comparing neural network representations.arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.00058, 2021
arXiv 2021
-
[7]
Understanding information storage and transfer in multi-modal large language models.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37:7400–7426, 2024
Samyadeep Basu, Martin Grayson, Cecily Morrison, Besmira Nushi, Soheil Feizi, and Daniela Massiceti. Understanding information storage and transfer in multi-modal large language models.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 37:7400–7426, 2024. 11
2024
-
[8]
Towards monosemanticity: Decomposing language models with dictionary learning.Transformer Circuits Thread, 2023
Trenton Bricken, Adly Templeton, Joshua Batson, Brian Chen, Adam Jermyn, Tom Con- erly, Nick Turner, Cem Anil, Carson Denison, Amanda Askell, Robert Lasenby, Yifan Wu, Shauna Kravec, Nicholas Schiefer, Tim Maxwell, Nicholas Joseph, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Alex Tamkin, Karina Nguyen, Brayden McLean, Josiah E Burke, Tristan Hume, Shan Carter, Tom Henighan, and ...
2023
Show all 99 references
-
[9]
Stage-wise model diffing
Trenton Bricken, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, Jonathan Marcus, Adam Jermyn, Christopher Olah, Kelley Rivoire, and Thomas Henighan. Stage-wise model diffing. 2024. https: //transformer-circuits.pub/2024/model-diffing/index.html
2024
-
[10]
Observing and controlling features in vision-language-action models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05487, 2026
Hugo Buurmeijer, Carmen Amo Alonso, Aiden Swann, and Marco Pavone. Observing and controlling features in vision-language-action models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05487, 2026
2026
-
[11]
Improving steering vectors by targeting sparse autoencoder features.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.02193, 2024
Sviatoslav Chalnev, Matthew Siu, and Arthur Conmy. Improving steering vectors by targeting sparse autoencoder features.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.02193, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[12]
Pappas, Florian Tramer, Hamed Hassani, and Eric Wong
Patrick Chao, Edoardo Debenedetti, Alexander Robey, Maksym Andriushchenko, Francesco Croce, Vikash Sehwag, Edgar Dobriban, Nicolas Flammarion, George J. Pappas, Florian Tramer, Hamed Hassani, and Eric Wong. JailbreakBench: An open robustness benchmark for jailbreaking large la...
2024
-
[13]
Interpreting and controlling vision foundation models via text explanations.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.10591, 2023
Haozhe Chen, Junfeng Yang, Carl V ondrick, and Chengzhi Mao. Interpreting and controlling vision foundation models via text explanations.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.10591, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[14]
Llava-more: A comparative study of llms and visual backbones for enhanced visual instruction tuning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.15621, 2025
Federico Cocchi, Nicholas Moratelli, Davide Caffagni, Sara Sarto, Lorenzo Baraldi, Marcella Cornia, and Rita Cucchiara. Llava-more: A comparative study of llms and visual backbones for enhanced visual instruction tuning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.15621, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[15]
Explaining how visual, textual and multimodal encoders share concepts.arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.18512, 2025
Clement Cornet, Romaric Besancon, and Herve Le Borgne. Explaining how visual, textual and multimodal encoders share concepts.arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.18512, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[16]
Sparse autoen- coders find highly interpretable features in language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.08600, 2023
Hoagy Cunningham, Aidan Ewart, Logan Riggs, Robert Huben, and Lee Sharkey. Sparse autoen- coders find highly interpretable features in language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.08600, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[17]
Case study: Interpreting, manipulating, and controlling CLIP with sparse autoencoders
Gytis Daujotas. Case study: Interpreting, manipulating, and controlling CLIP with sparse autoencoders. LessWrong, August 2024. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ iYFuZo9BMvr6GgMs5/
2024
-
[18]
Toy models of superposition, 2022
Nelson Elhage, Tristan Hume, Catherine Olsson, Nicholas Schiefer, Tom Henighan, Shauna Kravec, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Robert Lasenby, Dawn Drain, Carol Chen, Roger Grosse, Sam McCandlish, Jared Kaplan, Dario Amodei, Martin Wattenberg, and Christopher Olah. Toy models of superposi...
2022 arXiv
-
[19]
Why does unsupervised pre-training help deep learning? 11:625–660, March
Dumitru Erhan, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol, Pascal Vincent, and Samy Bengio. Why does unsupervised pre-training help deep learning? 11:625–660, March
-
[20]
Interpreting clip’s image representa- tion via text-based decomposition.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05916, 2023
Yossi Gandelsman, Alexei A Efros, and Jacob Steinhardt. Interpreting clip’s image representa- tion via text-based decomposition.arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05916, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[21]
Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04093, 2024
Leo Gao, Tom Dupré la Tour, Henk Tillman, Gabriel Goh, Rajan Troll, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, and Jeffrey Wu. Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04093, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[22]
Gemma 2: Improving open language models at a practical size.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.00118, 2024
Gemma Team, Morgane Riviere, Shreya Pathak, Pier Giuseppe Sessa, Cassidy Hardin, Surya Bhupatiraju, Léonard Hussenot, Thomas Mesnard, Bobak Shahriari, Alexandre Ramé, et al. Gemma 2: Improving open language models at a practical size.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.00118, 2024. 12
2024 arXiv
-
[23]
FigStep: Jailbreaking large vision-language models via typographic visual prompts
Yichen Gong, Delong Ran, Jinyuan Liu, Conglei Wang, Tianshuo Cong, Anyu Wang, Sisi Duan, and Xiaoyun Wang. FigStep: Jailbreaking large vision-language models via typographic visual prompts. InProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025
2025
-
[24]
Making the v in vqa matter: Elevating the role of image understanding in visual question answering
Yash Goyal, Tejas Khot, Douglas Summers-Stay, Dhruv Batra, and Devi Parikh. Making the v in vqa matter: Elevating the role of image understanding in visual question answering. InProceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 6904–6913, 2017
2017
-
[25]
Not all features are created equal: A mechanistic study of vision-language-action models
Bryce Grant, Xijia Zhao, and Peng Wang. Not all features are created equal: A mechanistic study of vision-language-action models. InICLR Workshop on Multimodal Intelligence, 2026. arXiv:2603.19233
2026
-
[26]
The llama 3 herd of models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21783, 2024
Aaron Grattafiori, Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Alex Vaughan, et al. The llama 3 herd of models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.21783, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[27]
Mechanistic interpretability for steering vision-language-action models
Bear Häon, Kaylene Stocking, Ian Chuang, and Claire Tomlin. Mechanistic interpretability for steering vision-language-action models. InConference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025. arXiv:2509.00328
2025 arXiv
-
[28]
Llama scope: Extracting millions of features from llama-3.1-8b with sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20526, 2024
Zhengfu He, Wentao Shu, Xuyang Ge, Lingjie Chen, Junxuan Wang, Yunhua Zhou, Frances Liu, Qipeng Guo, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, et al. Llama scope: Extracting millions of features from llama-3.1-8b with sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20526, 2024
-
[29]
In-context learning creates task vectors
Roee Hendel, Mor Geva, and Amir Globerson. In-context learning creates task vectors. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 9318–9333, 2023
2023
-
[30]
VLSBench: Unveiling visual leakage in multimodal safety.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.19939, 2024
Xuhao Hu, Dongrui Liu, Hao Li, Xuanjing Huang, and Jing Shao. VLSBench: Unveiling visual leakage in multimodal safety.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.19939, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[31]
Sleeper agents: Training deceptive llms that persist through safety training.arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05566, 2024
Evan Hubinger, Carson Denison, Jesse Mu, Mike Lambert, Meg Tong, Monte MacDiarmid, Tamera Lanham, Daniel M Ziegler, Tim Maxwell, Newton Cheng, et al. Sleeper agents: Training deceptive llms that persist through safety training.arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05566, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[32]
Interpreting and editing vision-language representations to mitigate hallucinations.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02762, 2024
Nick Jiang, Anish Kachinthaya, Suzie Petryk, and Yossi Gandelsman. Interpreting and editing vision-language representations to mitigate hallucinations.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02762, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[33]
A “diff” tool for AI: Finding behavioral differences in new models
Thomas Jiralerspong and Trenton Bricken. A “diff” tool for AI: Finding behavioral differences in new models. Anthropic Research, March 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/research/ diff-tool
2026
-
[34]
Bridging the VLM and mech interp communities for multimodal interpretability
Sonia Joseph. Bridging the VLM and mech interp communities for multimodal interpretability. LessWrong, October 2024.https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aa5fzGr8JA3pqvhYC/
2024
-
[35]
Steering CLIP’s vision transformer with sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08729, 2025
Sonia Joseph, Praneet Suresh, Ethan Goldfarb, Lorenz Hufe, Yossi Gandelsman, Robert Graham, Danilo Bzdok, Wojciech Samek, and Blake Aaron Richards. Steering CLIP’s vision transformer with sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08729, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[36]
Prisma: An open source toolkit for mechanistic interpretability in vision and video
Sonia Joseph, Praneet Suresh, Yash Vadi, Rob Graham, Lorenz Hufe, Edward Stevinson, Ethan Goldfarb, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Lee Sharkey, and Danilo Bzdok. Prisma: An open source toolkit for mechanistic interpretability in vision and video. InCVPR Workshop on Mechanistic Interpre...
2025 arXiv
-
[37]
Analyzing fine-tuning representation shift for multimodal llms steering alignment.arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.03012, 2025
Pegah Khayatan, Mustafa Shukor, Jayneel Parekh, and Matthieu Cord. Analyzing fine-tuning representation shift for multimodal llms steering alignment.arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.03012, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[38]
Saes (usually) transfer between base and chat models
Connor Kissane, Robert Krzyzanowski, Arthur Conmy, and Neel Nanda. Saes (usually) transfer between base and chat models. AI Alignment Forum post, July 18 2024. 13
2024
-
[39]
Similarity of neural network representations revisited
Simon Kornblith, Mohammad Norouzi, Honglak Lee, and Geoffrey Hinton. Similarity of neural network representations revisited. InInternational conference on machine learning, pages 3519–3529. PMlR, 2019
2019
-
[40]
Sakla, and Kowshik Thopalli
Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng, Vivek Narayanaswamy, Shusen Liu, Wesam A. Sakla, and Kowshik Thopalli. Interpretable and steerable concept bottleneck sparse autoencoders. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),
-
[41]
Understanding image representations by measuring their equivariance and equivalence
Karel Lenc and Andrea Vedaldi. Understanding image representations by measuring their equivariance and equivalence. InProceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 991–999, 2015
2015
-
[42]
Llava-next-interleave: Tackling multi-image, video, and 3d in large multimodal models
Feng Li, Renrui Zhang, Hao Zhang, Yuanhan Zhang, Bo Li, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, and Chunyuan Li. Llava-next-interleave: Tackling multi-image, video, and 3d in large multimodal models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.07895, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[43]
Inference- time intervention: Eliciting truthful answers from a language model
Kenneth Li, Oam Patel, Fernanda Viégas, Hanspeter Pfister, and Martin Wattenberg. Inference- time intervention: Eliciting truthful answers from a language model. InAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
2023
-
[44]
Images are Achilles’ heel of alignment: Exploiting visual vulnerabilities for jailbreaking multimodal large language models
Yifan Li, Hangyu Guo, Kun Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao, and Ji-Rong Wen. Images are Achilles’ heel of alignment: Exploiting visual vulnerabilities for jailbreaking multimodal large language models. InEuropean Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
2024
-
[45]
Convergent learning: Do different neural networks learn the same representations?arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07543, 2015
Yixuan Li, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, Hod Lipson, and John Hopcroft. Convergent learning: Do different neural networks learn the same representations?arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07543, 2015
2015 arXiv
-
[46]
Gemma Scope: Open sparse autoencoders everywhere all at once on Gemma 2.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.05147, 2024
Tom Lieberum, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Arthur Conmy, Lewis Smith, Nicolas Sonnerat, Vikrant Varma, János Kramár, Anca Dragan, Rohin Shah, and Neel Nanda. Gemma Scope: Open sparse autoencoders everywhere all at once on Gemma 2.arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.05147, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[47]
Sparse autoencoders reveal selective remapping of visual concepts during adaptation
Hyesu Lim, Jinho Choi, Jaegul Choo, and Steffen Schneider. Sparse autoencoders reveal selective remapping of visual concepts during adaptation. InInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. arXiv:2412.05276
2025 arXiv
-
[48]
A survey on mecha- nistic interpretability for multi-modal foundation models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.17516, 2025
Zihao Lin, Samyadeep Basu, Mohammad Beigi, Varun Manjunatha, et al. A survey on mecha- nistic interpretability for multi-modal foundation models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.17516, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[49]
Sparse crosscoders for cross-layer features and model diffing, October 25 2024
Jack Lindsey, Adly Templeton, Jonathan Marcus, Thomas Conerly, Joshua Batson, and Christo- pher Olah. Sparse crosscoders for cross-layer features and model diffing, October 25 2024. Published on Transformer Circuits Thread; https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/ crosscoders/index.html
2024
-
[50]
Visual spatial reasoning.Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023
Fangyu Liu, Guy Edward Toh Emerson, and Nigel Collier. Visual spatial reasoning.Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023
2023
-
[51]
Visual instruction tuning.Advances in neural information processing systems, 36:34892–34916, 2023
Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Qingyang Wu, and Yong Jae Lee. Visual instruction tuning.Advances in neural information processing systems, 36:34892–34916, 2023
2023
-
[52]
Improved baselines with visual instruction tuning
Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yuheng Li, and Yong Jae Lee. Improved baselines with visual instruction tuning. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pages 26296–26306, 2024
2024
-
[53]
MM-SafetyBench: A benchmark for safety evaluation of multimodal large language models
Xin Liu, Yichen Zhu, Jindong Gu, Yunshi Lan, Chao Yang, and Yu Qiao. MM-SafetyBench: A benchmark for safety evaluation of multimodal large language models. InEuropean Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
2024
-
[54]
OCRBench: On the hidden mystery of OCR in large multimodal models.Science China Information Sciences, 2024
Yuliang Liu, Zhang Li, Mingxin Huang, Biao Yang, Wenwen Yu, Chunyuan Li, Xu-Cheng Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu, Lianwen Jin, and Xiang Bai. OCRBench: On the hidden mystery of OCR in large multimodal models.Science China Information Sciences, 2024. arXiv:2305.07895. 14
2024 arXiv
-
[55]
Michaud, Yonatan Belinkov, David Bau, and Aaron Mueller
Samuel Marks, Can Rager, Eric J. Michaud, Yonatan Belinkov, David Bau, and Aaron Mueller. Sparse feature circuits: Discovering and editing interpretable causal graphs in language models. InInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
2025
-
[56]
Locating and editing factual associations in GPT
Kevin Meng, David Bau, Alex Andonian, and Yonatan Belinkov. Locating and editing factual associations in GPT. InAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022
2022
-
[57]
Robustly identifying concepts introduced during chat fine-tuning using crosscoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02922, 2025
Julian Minder, Clément Dumas, Caden Juang, Bilal Chugtai, and Neel Nanda. Robustly identifying concepts introduced during chat fine-tuning using crosscoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02922, 2025
2025
-
[58]
What we learned trying to diff base and chat models (and why it matters).LessWrong, 2025
Julian Minder, Clément Dumas, and Neel Nanda. What we learned trying to diff base and chat models (and why it matters).LessWrong, 2025
2025
-
[59]
Insights on crosscoder model diffing
Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, Trenton Bricken, Jack Lindsey, Adam Jermyn, Jonathan Marcus, Kelley Rivoire, Christopher Olah, and Thomas Henighan. Insights on crosscoder model diffing. Transformer Circuits Thread, February 2025. https://transformer-circuits. pub/2025/crosscoder-diff...
2025
-
[60]
Attribution patching: Activation patching at industrial scale
Neel Nanda. Attribution patching: Activation patching at industrial scale. https://www. neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability, 2023. Accessed: 2025-08-23
2023
-
[61]
To- wards interpreting visual information processing in vision-language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.07149, 2024
Clement Neo, Luke Ong, Philip Torr, Mor Geva, David Krueger, and Fazl Barez. To- wards interpreting visual information processing in vision-language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.07149, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[62]
Steering language model refusal with sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.11296, 2024
Kyle O’Brien, David Majercak, Xavier Fernandes, Richard Edgar, Jingya Chen, Harsha Nori, Dean Carignan, Eric Horvitz, and Forough Poursabzi-Sangdeh. Steering language model refusal with sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.11296, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[63]
Zoom in: An introduction to circuits.Distill, 2020
Chris Olah, Nick Cammarata, Ludwig Schubert, Gabriel Goh, Michael Petrov, and Shan Carter. Zoom in: An introduction to circuits.Distill, 2020. doi: 10.23915/distill.00024.001. https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/zoom-in
2020 doi
-
[64]
Visualizing representations: Deep learning and human beings
Christopher Olah. Visualizing representations: Deep learning and human beings. https:// colah.github.io/posts/2015-01-Visualizing-Representations/ , 2015. Accessed: 2025-08-23
2015
-
[65]
Probing the representational power of sparse autoencoders in vision models
Matthew Lyle Olson, Neale Ratzlaff, Musashi Hinck, Shao-Yen Tseng, Changbai Li, Phillip Howard, and Vasudev Lal. Probing the representational power of sparse autoencoders in vision models. InICCV Workshops, 2025. arXiv:2508.11277
2025
-
[66]
Gpt-4o-mini: Advancing cost-efficient intelligence
OpenAI. Gpt-4o-mini: Advancing cost-efficient intelligence. https://openai.com/index/ gpt-4o-mini-advancing-cost-efficient-intelligence/ , 2024. Accessed: 2024-12- 21
2024
-
[67]
Sparse autoencoders learn monosemantic features in vision-language models
Mateusz Pach, Shyamgopal Karthik, Quentin Bouniot, Serge Belongie, and Zeynep Akata. Sparse autoencoders learn monosemantic features in vision-language models. InAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025. arXiv:2504.02821
2025
-
[68]
Towards vision-language mechanistic interpretability: A causal tracing tool for blip
Vedant Palit, Rohan Pandey, Aryaman Arora, and Paul Pu Liang. Towards vision-language mechanistic interpretability: A causal tracing tool for blip. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pages 2856–2861, 2023
2023
-
[69]
I’m sorry, I can’t
Nirmalendu Prakash, Wei Jie Yeo, Amir Abdullah, Ranjan Satapathy, Erik Cambria, and Roy Ka-Wei Lee. Beyond “I’m sorry, I can’t”: Dissecting large language model refusal.arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09708, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[70]
Visual adversarial examples jailbreak aligned large language models
Xiangyu Qi, Kaixuan Huang, Ashwinee Panda, Peter Henderson, Mengdi Wang, and Prateek Mittal. Visual adversarial examples jailbreak aligned large language models. InProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 38, pages 21527–21536, 2024
2024
-
[71]
Qwen-Scope: An open sparse autoencoder suite for the Qwen model family
Qwen Team. Qwen-Scope: An open sparse autoencoder suite for the Qwen model family. Technical report, Alibaba Qwen, April 2026. https://qianwen-res.oss-accelerate. aliyuncs.com/qwen-scope/Qwen_Scope.pdf. 15
2026
-
[72]
Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision
Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy, Aditya Ramesh, Gabriel Goh, Sandhini Agarwal, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Pamela Mishkin, Jack Clark, et al. Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. InInternational conference on machine learning, pag...
2021
-
[73]
Jumping ahead: Improving reconstruction fidelity with JumpReLU sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.14435, 2024
Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Tom Lieberum, Nicolas Sonnerat, Arthur Conmy, Vikrant Varma, János Kramár, and Neel Nanda. Jumping ahead: Improving reconstruction fidelity with JumpReLU sparse autoencoders.arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.14435, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[74]
Steering Llama 2 via contrastive activation addition
Nina Rimsky, Nick Gabrieli, Julian Schulz, Meg Tong, Evan Hubinger, and Alexander Matt Turner. Steering Llama 2 via contrastive activation addition. InProceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15504–1...
2024 arXiv
-
[75]
Multi- modal neurons in pretrained text-only transformers
Sarah Schwettmann, Neil Chowdhury, Samuel Klein, David Bau, and Antonio Torralba. Multi- modal neurons in pretrained text-only transformers. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Interna- tional Conference on Computer Vision, pages 2862–2867, 2023
2023
-
[76]
SteerVLM: Robust model control through lightweight activation steering for vision language models
Anushka Sivakumar, Andrew Zhang, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, and Chris Thomas. SteerVLM: Robust model control through lightweight activation steering for vision language models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, 2025
2025
-
[77]
Lvlm-interpret: an interpretability tool for large vision-language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.03118, 2024
Gabriela Ben Melech Stan, Estelle Aflalo, Raanan Yehezkel Rohekar, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Shao-Yen Tseng, Matthew Lyle Olson, Yaniv Gurwicz, Chenfei Wu, Nan Duan, and Vasudev Lal. Lvlm-interpret: an interpretability tool for large vision-language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:24...
2024 arXiv
-
[78]
PaliGemma 2: A family of versatile VLMs for transfer.arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.03555, 2024
Andreas Steiner, André Susano Pinto, Michael Tschannen, Daniel Keysers, Xiao Wang, Yonatan Bitton, Alexey Gritsenko, Matthias Minderer, Anthony Sherbondy, Shangbang Long, Siyang Qin, Reeve Ingle, Emanuele Bugliarello, Sahar Kazemzadeh, Thomas Mesnard, Ibrahim Alab- dulmohsin, ...
2024 arXiv
-
[79]
Daniel Freeman, Theodore R
Adly Templeton, Tom Conerly, Jonathan Marcus, Jack Lindsey, Trenton Bricken, Brian Chen, Adam Pearce, Craig Citro, Emmanuel Ameisen, Andy Jones, Hoagy Cunningham, Nicholas L Turner, Callum McDougall, Monte MacDiarmid, C. Daniel Freeman, Theodore R. Sumers, Edward Rees, Joshua ...
2024
-
[80]
Li, Arnab Sen Sharma, Aaron Mueller, Byron C
Eric Todd, Millicent L. Li, Arnab Sen Sharma, Aaron Mueller, Byron C. Wallace, and David Bau. Function vectors in large language models. InInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
2024
-
[81]
Eyes wide shut? exploring the visual shortcomings of multimodal llms
Shengbang Tong, Zhuang Liu, Yuexiang Zhai, Yi Ma, Yann LeCun, and Saining Xie. Eyes wide shut? exploring the visual shortcomings of multimodal llms. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages 9568–9578, 2024
2024
-
[82]
Vazquez, Ulisse Mini, and Monte MacDiarmid
Alexander Matt Turner, Lisa Thiergart, Gavin Leech, David Udell, Juan J. Vazquez, Ulisse Mini, and Monte MacDiarmid. Steering language models with activation engineering.arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.10248, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[83]
Too late to recall: The two-hop problem in multimodal knowledge retrieval
Constantin Venhoff, Ashkan Khakzar, Sonia Joseph, Philip Torr, and Neel Nanda. Too late to recall: The two-hop problem in multimodal knowledge retrieval. InMechanistic Interpretability for Vision (Non-proceedings Track), CVPR 2025, 2025. URL https://openreview.net/ forum?id=VUhRdZp8ke
2025
-
[84]
How visual representations map to language feature space in multimodal llms.arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11976, 2025
Constantin Venhoff, Ashkan Khakzar, Sonia Joseph, Philip Torr, and Neel Nanda. How visual representations map to language feature space in multimodal llms.arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11976, 2025. 16
2025 arXiv
-
[85]
Steering away from harm: An adaptive approach to defending vision language model against jailbreaks
Han Wang, Gang Wang, and Huan Zhang. Steering away from harm: An adaptive approach to defending vision language model against jailbreaks. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
2025
-
[86]
Internvl3.5: Advancing open-source multimodal models in versatility, reasoning, and efficiency, 2025
Weiyun Wang, Zhangwei Gao, Lixin Gu, Hengjun Pu, Long Cui, Xingguang Wei, Zhaoyang Liu, Linglin Jing, Shenglong Ye, Jie Shao, Zhaokai Wang, Zhe Chen, Hongjie Zhang, Ganlin Yang, Haomin Wang, Qi Wei, Jinhui Yin, Wenhao Li, Erfei Cui, Guanzhou Chen, Zichen Ding, Changyao Tian, Z...
2025 arXiv
-
[87]
AdaShield: Safeguarding multimodal large language models from structure-based attack via adaptive shield prompting
Yu Wang, Xiaogeng Liu, Yu Li, Muhao Chen, and Chaowei Xiao. AdaShield: Safeguarding multimodal large language models from structure-based attack via adaptive shield prompting. InEuropean Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
2024
-
[88]
Llava-o1: Let vision language models reason step-by-step.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.10440, 2024
Guowei Xu, Peng Jin, Li Hao, Yibing Song, Lichao Sun, and Li Yuan. Llava-o1: Let vision language models reason step-by-step.arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.10440, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[89]
Qwen3 technical report, 2025
An Yang, Anfeng Li, Baosong Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bo Zheng, Bowen Yu, Chang Gao, Chengen Huang, Chenxu Lv, Chujie Zheng, Dayiheng Liu, Fan Zhou, Fei Huang, Feng Hu, Hao Ge, Haoran Wei, Huan Lin, Jialong Tang, Jian Yang, Jianhong Tu, Jianwei Zhang, Jianxin Yang, Jia...
2025 arXiv
-
[90]
SafeSteer: Adaptive subspace steering for efficient jailbreak defense in vision-language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21400, 2025
Xiyu Zeng, Siyuan Liang, Liming Lu, Haotian Zhu, Enguang Liu, Jisheng Dang, Yongbin Zhou, and Shuchao Pang. SafeSteer: Adaptive subspace steering for efficient jailbreak defense in vision-language models.arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21400, 2025
2025
-
[91]
Sigmoid loss for language image pre-training
Xiaohua Zhai, Basil Mustafa, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Lucas Beyer. Sigmoid loss for language image pre-training. InProceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages 11975–11986, 2023
2023
-
[92]
Towards best practices of activation patching in language models: Metrics and methods
Fred Zhang and Neel Nanda. Towards best practices of activation patching in language models: Metrics and methods. InInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024. URLhttps://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.16042. arXiv:2309.16042
-
[93]
Cross-modal information flow in multimodal large language models
Zhi Zhang, Srishti Yadav, Fengze Han, and Ekaterina Shutova. Cross-modal information flow in multimodal large language models. InIEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
2025
-
[94]
Multimodal situational safety
Kaiwen Zhou, Chengzhi Liu, Xuandong Zhao, Anderson Compalas, Dawn Song, and Xin Eric Wang. Multimodal situational safety. InInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. 17 Appendix: Table of Contents A Preliminaries18 A.1 Multimodal Large Language Models ...
2025
-
[95]
Relocated
for PaliGemma 2, and Qwen-Scope Top-K SAEs [71] for the Qwen3 backbone of InternVL3.5- 2B). Where a property is shared across the models we report it as a property of MMDiff; where it is specific to one MLLM we say so explicitly. A.2 Sparse Autoencoders Motivation.Internal rep...
-
[96]
Select up tok=5top-activating samples (deduped across VQA / VQA-spatial / VSR)
-
[97]
Call the API once to generate a single concise description
-
[98]
Validate using held-out positive samples and random VQA negatives (two short rounds)
-
[99]
this neuron activates for
Compute F1 as a lightweight proxy for description confidence. Outputs are stored per feature as JSON ( description, examples, classification results). Adding overlays improves interpretability, with early results showing a typical gain of about+0.2F1. Prompt A: Description (RA...
Reviewed August 11, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.