Jérémie Dentan
2026
Unveiling Decision-Making in LLMs for Text Classification : Extraction of influential and interpretable concepts with Sparse Autoencoders
Mathis Le Bail | Jérémie Dentan | Davide Buscaldi | Vanier Sonia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Mathis Le Bail | Jérémie Dentan | Davide Buscaldi | Vanier Sonia
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have been successfully used to probe Large Language Models (LLMs) and extract interpretable concepts from their internal representations. These concepts are linear combinations of neuron activations that correspond to human-interpretable features. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of SAE-based explainability approaches for sentence classification, a domain where such methods have not been extensively explored. We present a novel SAE-based model ClassifSAE tailored for text classification, leveraging a specialized classifier head and incorporating an activation rate sparsity loss. We benchmark this architecture against established methods such as ConceptShap, Independent Component Analysis, HI-Concept and a standard TopK-SAE baseline. Our evaluation covers several classification benchmarks and backbone LLMs. We further enrich our analysis with two novel metrics for measuring the precision of concept-based explanations, using an external sentence encoder. Our empirical results show that ClassifSAE improves both the causality and interpretability of the extracted features.
MUCH: A Multilingual Claim Hallucination Benchmark
Jérémie Dentan | Alexi Stanislas Canesse | Davide Buscaldi | Aymen Shabou | Sonia Vanier
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Jérémie Dentan | Alexi Stanislas Canesse | Davide Buscaldi | Aymen Shabou | Sonia Vanier
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Claim-level Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is a promising approach to mitigate the lack of reliability in Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce MUCH, the first claim-level UQ benchmark designed for fair and reproducible evaluation of future methods under realistic conditions. It includes 4,876 samples across four European languages (English, French, Spanish, and German) and four instruction-tuned open-weight LLMs. Unlike prior claim-level benchmarks, we release 24 generation logits per token, facilitating the development of future white-box methods without re-generating data. Moreover, in contrast to previous benchmarks that rely on manual or LLM-based segmentation, we propose a new deterministic algorithm capable of segmenting claims using as little as 0.1% of the LLM generation time. This makes our segmentation approach suitable for real-time monitoring of LLM outputs, ensuring that MUCH evaluates UQ methods under realistic deployment constraints. Finally, our evaluations show that current methods still have substantial room for improvement in both performance and efficiency.