arXiv:2510.00404cs.LGcs.AI2025-10被引 9

提出AbsTopK,让自编码器能同时捕捉正负向语义,提升可解释性。

AbsTopK: Rethinking Sparse Autoencoders For Bidirectional Features

  • 从字典学习出发,用近端梯度法推导出新型稀疏自编码器
  • 在4个大模型上,重构精度和概念表达能力均优于传统方法
  • 适合需要双向语义表示的可解释性研究者使用

稀疏自编码器(SAEs)已成为大型语言模型(LLMs)可解释性的有力工具,旨在将隐藏状态分解为有意义的语义特征。尽管已有多种SAE变体,但尚无从原始字典学习公式出发的系统性推导框架。本文通过展开近端梯度法求解稀疏编码,建立此类框架,并发现单步更新可自然恢复常见的ReLU、JumpReLU和TopK等SAE变体。由此揭示现有SAE的根本局限:其稀疏性正则项强制非负性,导致单一特征无法表示双向概念(如男/女)。这种结构限制使语义轴被拆分为冗余的独立特征,影响表征完整性。为此,我们提出基于ℓ₀稀疏约束的AbsTopK SAE,采用对最大绝对值激活进行硬阈值处理,保留正负激活,从而揭示更丰富的双向概念表征。在四个LLM及七项探测与操控任务上的综合实验表明,AbsTopK显著提升重构保真度、增强可解释性,并使单个特征可编码对立概念。惊人的是,其性能达到甚至超越差值均值法(Difference-in-Mean),该监督方法需每概念标注数据,在先前研究中已被证明优于普通SAE。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as powerful techniques for interpretability of large language models (LLMs), aiming to decompose hidden states into meaningful semantic features. While several SAE variants have been proposed, there remains no principled framework to derive SAEs from the original dictionary learning formulation. In this work, we introduce such a framework by unrolling the proximal gradient method for sparse coding. We show that a single-step update naturally recovers common SAE variants, including ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. Through this lens, we reveal a fundamental limitation of existing SAEs: their sparsity-inducing regularizers enforce non-negativity, preventing a single feature from representing bidirectional concepts (e.g., male vs. female). This structural constraint fragments semantic axes into separate, redundant features, limiting representational completeness. To address this issue, we propose AbsTopK SAE, a new variant derived from the $\ell_0$ sparsity constraint that applies hard thresholding over the largest-magnitude activations. By preserving both positive and negative activations, AbsTopK uncovers richer, bidirectional conceptual representations. Comprehensive experiments across four LLMs and seven probing and steering tasks show that AbsTopK improves reconstruction fidelity, enhances interpretability, and enables single features to encode contrasting concepts. Remarkably, AbsTopK matches or even surpasses the Difference-in-Mean method, a supervised approach that requires labeled data for each concept and has been shown in prior work to outperform SAEs.

可解释性自编码器双向表示大模型

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