用分层稀疏自编码器深入解析CLIP的语义特征,实现高精度与高稀疏性的平衡。
Interpreting CLIP with Hierarchical Sparse Autoencoders
- 提出分层稀疏自编码器(MSAE),同时优化重建质量与稀疏性。
- 在CLIP上达到0.99余弦相似度,未解释方差低于0.1,稀疏度约80%。
- 可提取120+语义概念,用于概念搜索与偏见分析,适合模型可解释性研究者。
稀疏自编码器(SAEs)在检测和操控神经网络中的可解释特征方面具有潜力,尤其适用于理解复杂的多模态表示。对于现代系统中关键的视觉-语言模型(如CLIP和SigLIP),SAEs尤为有价值,但现有方法受限于同时优化重建质量和稀疏性,依赖激活抑制或刚性稀疏约束。为此,我们提出马特罗什卡自编码器(MSAE),一种能同时学习多粒度层次表征的新架构,实现两者的直接优化而无需权衡。MSAE在CLIP上建立了新的最优帕累托前沿,实现0.99的余弦相似度,未解释方差低于0.1,且保持约80%的稀疏度。最后,我们展示了MSAE作为解析和控制CLIP的工具:从其表示中提取超过120个语义概念,用于下游任务如CelebA中的概念相似性搜索与偏见分析。代码已开源:https://github.com/WolodjaZ/MSAE。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are useful for detecting and steering interpretable features in neural networks, with particular potential for understanding complex multimodal representations. Given their ability to uncover interpretable features, SAEs are particularly valuable for analyzing large-scale vision-language models (e.g., CLIP and SigLIP), which are fundamental building blocks in modern systems yet remain challenging to interpret and control. However, current SAE methods are limited by optimizing both reconstruction quality and sparsity simultaneously, as they rely on either activation suppression or rigid sparsity constraints. To this end, we introduce Matryoshka SAE (MSAE), a new architecture that learns hierarchical representations at multiple granularities simultaneously, enabling a direct optimization of both metrics without compromise. MSAE establishes a new state-of-the-art Pareto frontier between reconstruction quality and sparsity for CLIP, achieving 0.99 cosine similarity and less than 0.1 fraction of variance unexplained while maintaining ~80% sparsity. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of MSAE as a tool for interpreting and controlling CLIP by extracting over 120 semantic concepts from its representation to perform concept-based similarity search and bias analysis in downstream tasks like CelebA. We make the codebase available at https://github.com/WolodjaZ/MSAE.
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