Concept Component Analysis: A Principled Approach for Concept Extraction in LLMs

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19952 Authors

Keywords: sparse autoencoders, human interpretable concept, Interpretability

Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a popular approach for extracting interpretable and monosemantic concepts by decomposing the LLM internal representations into a dictionary. Despite their empirical progress, SAEs suffer from a fundamental theoretical ambiguity: the well-defined correspondence between LLM representations and human-interpretable concepts remains unclear. This lack of theoretical grounding gives rise to several methodological challenges, including difficulties in principled method design and evaluation criteria. In this work, we show that, under mild assumptions, LLM representations can be approximated as a {linear mixture} of the log-posteriors over concepts given the input context, through the lens of a latent variable model where concepts are treated as latent variables. This motivates a principled framework for concept extraction, namely Concept Component Analysis (ConCA), which aims to recover the log-posterior of each concept from LLM representations through a {unsupervised} linear unmixing process. We explore a specific variant, termed sparse ConCA, which leverages a sparsity prior to address the inherent ill-posedness of the unmixing problem. We implement 12 sparse ConCA variants and demonstrate their ability to extract meaningful concepts across multiple pre-trained LLMs, showcasing clear advantages over SAEs.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 19952