Cascaded Sparse Autoencoders Learn Multi-Level Visual Concepts in Multimodal LLMs

Yusong Zhao; Hengyi Wang; Tanuja Ganu; Akshay Nambi; Hao Wang

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arXiv · 2606.16193

Cascaded Sparse Autoencoders Learn Multi-Level Visual Concepts in Multimodal LLMs

Yusong Zhao·Hengyi Wang·Tanuja Ganu·Akshay Nambi·Hao Wang

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Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language tasks, yet their internal visual representations remain difficult to interpret. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide a scalable way to decompose dense model activations into sparse, interpretable features. However, existing SAE architectures primarily recover flat feature dictionaries and are less suited for explicit multi-level concept organization. In this paper, we introduce cascaded sparse autoencoders (CSAEs) for learning hierarchical visual concepts in MLLMs. Rather than nesting or stacking SAE sparse activation codes, CSAEs train a second-level SAE directly on the decoder weights of the first-level SAE, treating learned low-level feature directions as inputs for higher-level abstraction. This design enables CSAEs to learn "concepts of concepts" while avoiding drawbacks from the shared-prefix coupling of nesting, Matryoshka-style hierarchies and the bottlenecks of naively stacked SAEs. Experiments across Qwen3-VL, Gemma-3, and LLaVA on multiple visual datasets show that CSAEs improve interpretability in terms of hierarchical concept coherence over state-of-the-art SAE baselines. Results on concept steering further demonstrate that the learned concept groups support effective group-level interventions in MLLM outputs.

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Yusong Zhao, Hengyi Wang, Tanuja Ganu, Akshay Nambi, Hao Wang. 2026-06-15. Cascaded Sparse Autoencoders Learn Multi-Level Visual Concepts in Multimodal LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16193

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