改进跨编码器方法,更准确识别聊天微调引入的语义概念。
Overcoming Sparsity Artifacts in Crosscoders to Interpret Chat-Tuning
- 用批量顶级采样损失替代L1损失,减少稀疏伪影干扰
- 在Gemma 2 2B上发现更多真实存在的聊天专属语义方向
- 可解释且有因果效应的概念如‘虚假信息’和‘拒绝触发’
模型差分研究微调如何改变模型表征与内部机制。许多有趣行为在微调中引入,模型差分为此提供了有力视角。跨编码器是一种新方法,通过在基础模型和微调模型中学习共享的可解释概念(以潜在方向表示),追踪概念在微调中的变化或出现。以往研究观察到某些概念在基础模型中无对应方向,推测其为微调引入。然而我们发现,跨编码器的L1训练损失引发两类问题,可能将本存在于双模型中的概念误判为仅属微调模型。我们提出潜空间缩放(Latent Scaling)来更准确衡量各潜变量在两模型中的存在度。在对比Gemma 2 2B基础模型与聊天模型的实验中,标准跨编码器受此问题严重影响。基于此,我们采用批次顶部采样(BatchTopK)损失训练跨编码器,显著缓解上述问题,识别出更多真正具有聊天特性的、高度可解释的概念。使用该方法,我们成功定位一组既可解释又具因果有效性的聊天专属潜变量,涵盖‘虚假信息’、‘个人提问’等概念,以及对不同拒绝触发条件呈现细微偏好的多个拒绝相关潜变量。本工作推进了基于跨编码器的模型差分方法的最佳实践,并证明其能提供关于聊天微调如何改变模型行为的具体洞见。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Model diffing is the study of how fine-tuning changes a model's representations and internal algorithms. Many behaviors of interest are introduced during fine-tuning, and model diffing offers a promising lens to interpret such behaviors. Crosscoders are a recent model diffing method that learns a shared dictionary of interpretable concepts represented as latent directions in both the base and fine-tuned models, allowing us to track how concepts shift or emerge during fine-tuning. Notably, prior work has observed concepts with no direction in the base model, and it was hypothesized that these model-specific latents were concepts introduced during fine-tuning. However, we identify two issues which stem from the crosscoders L1 training loss that can misattribute concepts as unique to the fine-tuned model, when they really exist in both models. We develop Latent Scaling to flag these issues by more accurately measuring each latent's presence across models. In experiments comparing Gemma 2 2B base and chat models, we observe that the standard crosscoder suffers heavily from these issues. Building on these insights, we train a crosscoder with BatchTopK loss and show that it substantially mitigates these issues, finding more genuinely chat-specific and highly interpretable concepts. We recommend practitioners adopt similar techniques. Using the BatchTopK crosscoder, we successfully identify a set of chat-specific latents that are both interpretable and causally effective, representing concepts such as $\textit{false information}$ and $\textit{personal question}$, along with multiple refusal-related latents that show nuanced preferences for different refusal triggers. Overall, our work advances best practices for the crosscoder-based methodology for model diffing and demonstrates that it can provide concrete insights into how chat-tuning modifies model behavior.
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