提出稀疏位移自编码器,让大模型概念可分离且可控
Sparse Shift Autoencoders for Identifying Concepts from Large Language Model Activations
- 通过学习嵌入差异而非原始嵌入,实现概念解耦
- 仅需弱监督即可准确识别并操控单一概念
- 在多个真实语料库中验证了概念可识别性
无监督的大型语言模型(LLM)可解释性方法,如稀疏自编码器(SAEs),能够将模型激活转化为可解释且理想情况下可调控的概念。这类方法避免了对概念标签、配对提示或显式因果模型的监督需求。然而,在缺乏额外假设的情况下,SAEs无法保证可识别性,可能学习到混合多个潜在概念的隐含维度。若用这些维度进行行为干预,非可识别性可能导致意外影响无关属性。本文将可识别性问题置于大模型可解释性研究的核心。我们提出稀疏位移自编码器(SSAEs),学习嵌入之间的差异而非嵌入本身。关键的是,我们证明了在成对观测中存在多个未知概念但并非全部时,SSAEs是可识别的。基于此,我们仅需弱监督即可精准操控单一概念。最后,我们在多个真实世界语言数据集上实证展示了从不同大模型中解耦激活并恢复可识别概念的能力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Unsupervised approaches to large language model (LLM) interpretability, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs), offer a way to decode LLM activations into interpretable and, ideally, controllable concepts. On the one hand, these approaches alleviate the need for supervision from concept labels, paired prompts, or explicit causal models. On the other hand, without additional assumptions, SAEs are not guaranteed to be identifiable. In practice, they may learn latent dimensions that entangle multiple underlying concepts. If we use these dimensions to extract vectors for steering specific LLM behaviours, this non-identifiability might result in interventions that inadvertently affect unrelated properties. In this paper, we bring the question of identifiability to the forefront of LLM interpretability research. Specifically, we introduce Sparse Shift Autoencoders (SSAEs) which learn sparse representations of differences between embeddings rather than the embeddings themselves. Crucially, we show that SSAEs are identifiable from paired observations which differ in multiple unknown concepts, but not all. With this key identifiability result, we show that we can steer single concepts with only this weak form of supervision. Finally, we empirically demonstrate identifiable concept recovery across multiple real-world language datasets by disentangling activations from different LLMs.
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