让稀疏激活更稳定,提升大模型推理速度与精度
Resting Neurons, Active Insights: Robustifying Activation Sparsity in LLMs via Spontaneity
- 引入自发神经元机制,用固定向量锚定稀疏计算
- 在多种大模型上恢复高稀疏率下的性能损失
- 适合追求高效推理的大模型部署者
激活稀疏性可通过选择性抑制隐藏层激活来加速大语言模型(LLM)推理,但现有方法在高稀疏度下会严重降低准确率。我们发现其根源在于表征不稳定性:激活稀疏性破坏了预训练期间学习的输入依赖激活,导致隐藏状态分布偏移。为此,我们将激活稀疏性重视为表征对齐问题,提出轻量级机制Spontaneous Neurons (SPON),受生物神经系统自发活动启发。SPON注入一组可学习、与输入无关的激活向量,作为稀疏计算的持久表征锚点。这些向量通过分布匹配训练以逼近密集模型,并可在训练后融入偏置项,推理开销极低。在多个LLM主干网络上,SPON均能有效恢复性能,稳定潜在表示并保持泛化能力。结果表明SPON是实现可靠激活稀疏推理的有效且原则性方案,并为大模型知识保留提供了新见解。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Activation sparsity offers a compelling route to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by selectively suppressing hidden activations, yet existing approaches exhibit severe accuracy degradation at high sparsity. We show that this failure stems from representational instability: *activation sparsity disrupts input-dependent activation learned during pretraining, inducing distribution shifts in hidden states.* We address this issue by reframing activation sparsity as a representational alignment problem and introducing **Spontaneous Neurons (SPON)**, a lightweight mechanism inspired by spontaneous neural activity in biological systems. SPON injects a small set of learnable, input-independent activation vectors that act as persistent representational anchors for sparse computation. These vectors are trained via distribution matching to the dense model and can be absorbed into bias terms after training, incurring negligible inference overhead. Across multiple LLM backbones, SPON consistently restores performance, stabilizes latent representations, and preserves generalization. Our results establish SPON as an effective and principled solution for reliable activation-sparse inference, and offer new insights into knowledge retention in LLMs.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。