Helen Treharne

Decodable but Misrouted: Sparse Features Uncover a Readout Gap in Vision-Language Models for Harmful Meme Detection

When large vision-language models misclassify harmful memes, the failure may reflect missing internal evidence or an inability to route represented evidence to their outputs. We distinguish these cases in Gemma-3 and Qwen3.5 using sparse autoencoders, role-conditioned probes, causal interventions, and recovery experime...