AAAI 2026 Main Conference

January 23, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

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Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs consistently fail to eliminate polysemanticity and exhibit pathological behavioral errors. We propose that neural networks encode information in two complementary spaces compressed into the same substrate: feature identity and feature integration. To test this dual encoding hypothesis, we develop sequential and joint-training architectures to capture identity and integration patterns simultaneously. Joint training achieves 41.3% reconstruction improvement and 51.6% reduction in KL divergence errors. This architecture spontaneously develops bimodal feature organization: orthogonal features contributing to integration pathways and the rest contributing directly to the residual. Small nonlinear components (3% of parameters) achieve 16.5% standalone improvements, demonstrating parameter-efficient capture of computational relationships crucial for behavior. Additionally, intervention experiments using 2×2 factorial stimulus designs demonstrated that integration features exhibit selective sensitivity to experimental manipulations and produce systematic behavioral effects on model outputs, including significant interaction effects across semantic dimensions. This work provides systematic evidence for (1) dual-encoding in neural representations, (2) meaningful nonlinearly encoded feature interactions, and (3) introduces an architectural paradigm shift from post-hoc feature analysis to integrated computational design, establishing foundations for next-generation SAEs.

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Next from AAAI 2026 Main Conference

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Proxy Zero-Shot Hashing with Multimodal Fusion via Stable Diffusion

AAAI 2026 Main Conference

+1Yuan Cao
Yuan Cao and 3 other authors

23 January 2026

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