arXiv:2510.22332cs.LGstat.ML2025-10NeurIPS被引 1

对比发现,模型自身记忆比自编码器提取的特征更易解释。

Transformer Key-Value Memories Are Nearly as Interpretable as Sparse Autoencoders

  • 将前馈层视为键值记忆,直接解析其特征向量。
  • 自编码器提取的特征与模型原生特征解释性相当,部分指标还略差。
  • 无需额外训练,直接分析模型参数即可获得可靠解释性结果。

近年来,大语言模型的可解释性研究多依赖代理模块进行特征发现,并通过稀疏自编码器(SAEs)评估所学特征质量。这一范式引发关键问题:这些学习到的特征是否优于模型原始参数中已存在的表示?目前系统性比较仍很少。本文从前馈层作为键值记忆的角度出发,采用现代可解释性基准对特征向量进行评估。广泛实验表明,SAEs与前馈层(FF)在解释性上处于相似范围,尽管SAEs在某些方面有微弱提升。更令人意外的是,在部分指标上,原始前馈层反而优于SAEs,且两类方法发现的特征存在显著差异。这质疑了使用SAEs相对于直接解析前馈层特征的必要性,也表明前馈层的键值参数已成为现代可解释性研究的强大基线。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent interpretability work on large language models (LLMs) has been increasingly dominated by a feature-discovery approach with the help of proxy modules. Then, the quality of features learned by, e.g., sparse auto-encoders (SAEs), is evaluated. This paradigm naturally raises a critical question: do such learned features have better properties than those already represented within the original model parameters, and unfortunately, only a few studies have made such comparisons systematically so far. In this work, we revisit the interpretability of feature vectors stored in feed-forward (FF) layers, given the perspective of FF as key-value memories, with modern interpretability benchmarks. Our extensive evaluation revealed that SAE and FFs exhibits a similar range of interpretability, although SAEs displayed an observable but minimal improvement in some aspects. Furthermore, in certain aspects, surprisingly, even vanilla FFs yielded better interpretability than the SAEs, and features discovered in SAEs and FFs diverged. These bring questions about the advantage of SAEs from both perspectives of feature quality and faithfulness, compared to directly interpreting FF feature vectors, and FF key-value parameters serve as a strong baseline in modern interpretability research.

可解释性大模型特征发现自编码器

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