CORTEXA
← Browse
arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-07-13

Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Out-of-Distribution Detection

Ayush Karmacharya, Luke Luschwitz, Lucia Romero, Yanan Niu, Joseph Campbell

Reliable detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models. Neural networks often produce overconfident predictions for inputs that deviate from their training data, leading to significant degradation in performance. While many OOD detection methods focus on the final output layer, they neglect the rich hierarchical information present in intermediate network layers. This paper introduces a novel approach that leverages sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to learn interpretable features from these intermediate activations. We find that in-distribution (ID) and OOD data activate distinct sets of these sparse features. We propose a new OOD score derived from the cosine similarity between the sparse feature activations of a test sample and the mean activations of ID classes. Our post-hoc detection method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard OOD detection benchmarks, but yields interpretable insights into how distribution shift affects learned representations.

View free PDFSource page

Related papers

arxivcs.CVcs.AIcs.RO2026-07-24

SM4RT: Learning Structured Motion Geometry for 4D Reconstruction

Shing Ho J. Lin, Wenzhao Zheng, Dong Zhuo, Yuqi Wu, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motio…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcs.AI2026-07-24Cited by 2

Explainable Reinforcement Learning for assisting Air Traffic Controllers

Anduel Mehmeti, Gabriella Gigante, Salvatore Venticinque

To effectively integrate AI into high-stakes, critical environments such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and aviation--and to advance toward higher levels of automation and seamless human-AI collaboration--building trust in AI-driven solutions is essential. Trust, in turn, is…

View free PDFSource page
arxivcond-mat.dis-nncond-mat.stat-mechcs.AInlin.CD2026-07-24

Multiplicity of Stable Attractors in Disordered Neural Models

Raffaele Marino, Roberto Livi, Antonio Politi

We show how large-deviation statistics allows one to obtain reliable estimates of the multiplicity of stable fixed-points in a model of neural ordinary differential equations previously employed in computational tasks. The result is obtained by developing a suitable perturbative…

View free PDFSource page