This paper proposes StrEBM, a structured latent energy-based model for source-wise structured representation learning. The framework is motivated by a broader goal of promoting identifiable and decoupled latent organization by assigning different latent dimensions their own learnable structural biases, rather than constraining the entire latent representation with a single shared energy. In this sense, blind source separation is adopted here as a concrete and verifiable testbed, through which the evolution of latent dimensions toward distinct underlying components can be directly examined. In the proposed framework, latent trajectories are optimized directly together with an observation-generation map and source-wise structural parameters. Each latent dimension is associated with its own energy-based formulation, allowing different latent components to gradually evolve toward distinct source-like roles during training. In the present study, this source-wise energy design is instantiated using Gaussian-process-inspired energies with learnable length-scales, but the framework itself is not restricted to Gaussian processes and is intended as a more general structured latent EBM formulation. Experiments on synthetic multichannel signals under linear and nonlinear mixing settings show that the proposed model can recover source components effectively, providing an initial empirical validation of the framework. At the same time, the study reveals important optimization characteristics, including slow late-stage convergence and reduced stability under nonlinear observation mappings. These findings not only clarify the practical behavior of the current GP-based instantiation, but also establish a basis for future investigation of richer source-wise energy families and more robust nonlinear optimization strategies.

Unsupervised mixture learning (UML) aims at identifying linearly or nonlinearly mixed latent components in a blind manner. UML is known to be challenging: Even learning linear mixtures requires highly nontrivial analytical tools, e.g., independent component analysis or nonnegative matrix factorization. In this work, the post-nonlinear (PNL) mixture model---where {\it unknown} element-wise nonlinear functions are imposed onto a linear mixture---is revisited. The PNL model is widely employed in different fields ranging from brain signal classification, speech separation, remote sensing, to causal discovery. To identify and remove the unknown nonlinear functions, existing works often assume different properties on the latent components (e.g., statistical independence or probability-simplex structures).

Low-rank recurrent neural networks (lrRNNs) are a class of models that uncover low-dimensional latent dynamics underlying neural population activity. Although their functional connectivity is low-rank, it lacks disentanglement interpretations, making it difficult to assign distinct computational roles to different latent dimensions. To address this, we propose the Disentangled Recurrent Neural Network (DisRNN), a generative lrRNN framework that assumes group-wise independence among latent dynamics while allowing flexible within-group entanglement. These independent latent groups allow latent dynamics to evolve separately, but are internally rich for complex computation. We reformulate the lrRNN under a variational autoencoder (VAE) framework, enabling us to introduce a partial correlation penalty that encourages disentanglement between groups of latent dimensions. Experiments on synthetic, monkey M1, and mouse voltage imaging data show that DisRNN consistently improves the disentanglement and interpretability of learned neural latent trajectories in low-dimensional space and low-rank connectivity over baseline lrRNNs that do not encourage partial disentanglement.

Latent component identification from unknown nonlinear mixtures is a foundational challenge in machine learning, with applications in tasks such as disentangled representation learning and causal inference. Prior work in nonlinear independent component analysis (nICA) has shown that auxiliary signals -- such as weak supervision -- can support identifiability of conditionally independent latent components. More recent approaches explore structural assumptions, e.g., sparsity in the Jacobian of the mixing function, to relax such requirements. In this work, we introduce Diverse Influence Component Analysis (DICA), a framework that exploits the convex geometry of the mixing function's Jacobian. We propose a Jacobian Volume Maximization (J-VolMax) criterion, which enables latent component identification by encouraging diversity in their influence on the observed variables. Under reasonable conditions, this approach achieves identifiability without relying on auxiliary information, latent component independence, or Jacobian sparsity assumptions. These results extend the scope of identifiability analysis and offer a complementary perspective to existing methods.

Measuring similarity is crucial to many learning tasks. It is also a richer and broader notion than what most metric learning algorithms can model. For example, similarity can arise from the process of aggregating the decisions of multiple latent components, where each latent component compares data in its own way by focusing on a different subset of features. In this paper, we propose Similarity Component Analysis (SCA), a probabilistic graphical model that discovers those latent components from data. In SCA, a latent component generates a local similarity value, computed with its own metric, independently of other components. The final similarity measure is then obtained by combining the local similarity values with a (noisy-)OR gate. We derive an EM-based algorithm for fitting the model parameters with similarity-annotated data from pairwise comparisons. We validate the SCA model on synthetic datasets where SCA discovers the ground-truth about the latent components. We also apply SCA to a multiway classification task and a link prediction task.

The modeling and prediction of multivariate spatio-temporal data involve numerous challenges. Dimension reduction methods can significantly simplify this process, provided that they account for the complex dependencies between variables and across time and space. Nonlinear blind source separation has emerged as a promising approach, particularly following recent advances in identifiability results. Building on these developments, we introduce the identifiable autoregressive variational autoen-coder, which ensures the identifiability of latent components consisting of nonstationary autoregressive processes. The blind source separation efficacy of the proposed method is showcased through a simulation study, where it is compared against state-of-the-art methods, and the spatio-temporal prediction performance is evaluated against several competitors on air pollution and weather datasets.

For this purpose, we propose an autoencoder equipped with a discriminator.

UML is known to be challenging: Even learning linear mixtures requires highly nontrivial analytical tools, e.g., independent component analysis or nonnegative matrix factorization.

Transformer-based CLIP models are widely used for text-image probing and feature extraction, making it relevant to understand the internal mechanisms behind their predictions. While recent works show that Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) yield interpretable latent components, they focus on what these encode and miss how they drive predictions. We introduce a scalable framework that reveals what latent components activate for, how they align with expected semantics, and how important they are to predictions. To achieve this, we adapt attribution patching for instance-wise component attributions in CLIP and highlight key faithfulness limitations of the widely used Logit Lens technique. By combining attributions with semantic alignment scores, we can automatically uncover reliance on components that encode semantically unexpected or spurious concepts. Applied across multiple CLIP variants, our method uncovers hundreds of surprising components linked to polysemous words, compound nouns, visual typography and dataset artifacts. While text embeddings remain prone to semantic ambiguity, they are more robust to spurious correlations compared to linear classifiers trained on image embeddings. A case study on skin lesion detection highlights how such classifiers can amplify hidden shortcuts, underscoring the need for holistic, mechanistic interpretability. We provide code at https://github.com/maxdreyer/attributing-clip.