Embedding Orrery: Visual Exploration of Embedding Spaces and Sparse Autoencoder Features

Giacomo De Luca


Abstract
Embedding Orrery is an open-source platform for interactive 3-dimensional visualization of embedding spaces, with native support for Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), built for data exploration and interpretability research. Given any textual, image, or vector dataset, a single pipeline - embedding, projection, clustering, automatic topic labeling and, optionally, the collection of per-document SAE feature activations - turns it into a 3D constellation that can be searched visually, semantically, lexically, or by SAE feature names; probes can be trained, configured and scored directly in the interface. SAEs are automatically downloaded and rendered as navigable constellations in which entering a prompt highlights the features it activates. Individual features can be inspected inside a dashboard and injected into the model for causal steering. The star-cartography-inspired interface sustains up to 500,000 points, including WebGL animations and volumetric nebula shaders, on 8 GB of RAM. Embedding Orrery is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Code: https://github.com/Giacomo-De-Luca/embedding-orrery. HF Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/GiacomoDeLuca/orrery-demo.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-demos.68
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Sweta Agrawal, Alberto Abad
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
717–727
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-demos.68/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Giacomo De Luca. 2026. Embedding Orrery: Visual Exploration of Embedding Spaces and Sparse Autoencoder Features. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 717–727, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Embedding Orrery: Visual Exploration of Embedding Spaces and Sparse Autoencoder Features (De Luca, EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-demos.68.pdf