Safe-SAIL: Towards a Fine-grained Safety Landscape of Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoder Interpretation Framework

Jiaqi Weng, Han Zheng, Hanyu Zhang, Qinqin He, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Zhixuan Chu, Xiting Wang

Increasing deployment of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications raises significant safety concerns. Most existing safety research focuses on evaluating LLM outputs or specific safety tasks, limiting their ability to ad- dress broader, undefined risks. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) facilitate interpretability research to clarify model behavior by explaining single-meaning atomic features decomposed from entangled signals. jHowever, prior applications on SAEs do not interpret features with fine-grained safety-related con- cepts, thus inadequately addressing safety-critical behaviors, such as generating toxic responses and violating safety regu- lations. For rigorous safety analysis, we must extract a rich and diverse set of safety-relevant features that effectively capture these high-risk behaviors, yet face two challenges: identifying SAEs with the greatest potential for generating safety concept-specific neurons, and the prohibitively high cost of detailed feature explanation. In this paper, we pro- pose Safe-SAIL, a framework for interpreting SAE features within LLMs to advance mechanistic understanding in safety domains. Our approach systematically identifies SAE with best concept-specific interpretability, explains safety-related neurons, and introduces efficient strategies to scale up the in- terpretation process. We will release a comprehensive toolkit including SAE checkpoints and human-readable neuron ex- planations, which supports empirical analysis of safety risks to promote research on LLM safety.

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