arXiv:2601.03595cs.AIcs.CL2026-01ACL被引 14

用稀疏自编码器让大模型推理更可控,纠正错误路径

Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering

  • 通过稀疏自编码器解耦隐藏状态中的推理策略
  • 识别出控制特定推理策略的有效特征,提升控制效果15%以上
  • 适合需要可解释、可干预推理的AI研究者和工程师

大型推理模型在复杂任务中表现出类人认知推理策略(如回溯、交叉验证),但其自主选择策略常导致低效甚至错误路径。为提升推理可靠性与灵活性,需实现对推理策略的精确控制。现有方法因模型隐层状态存在概念混杂而难以实现细粒度控制。本文利用稀疏自编码器(SAE)将混杂的隐藏状态分解为解耦特征空间,并提出SAE-Steering——一种两阶段特征识别流程:首先筛选出增强策略关键词概率的特征,过滤掉超过99%无关特征;再根据控制有效性排序剩余特征。基于识别出的策略特异性特征作为控制向量,SAE-Steering在控制效果上优于现有方法15%以上。此外,通过干预推理策略,可引导模型从错误路径转向正确路径,实现7%的绝对准确率提升。代码与数据已公开于https://github.com/Peter-Fy/SAE-Steering。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit human-like cognitive reasoning strategies (\eg backtracking, cross-verification) during the reasoning process, which improves their performance on complex tasks. Currently, reasoning strategies are autonomously selected by LRMs themselves. However, such autonomous selection often produces inefficient or even erroneous reasoning paths. To make reasoning more reliable and flexible, it is important to develop methods for controlling reasoning strategies. Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs' hidden states. To address this, we leverage Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space. To identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features, we propose SAE-Steering, an efficient two-stage feature identification pipeline. SAE-Steering first recalls features that amplify the logits of strategy-specific keywords, filtering out over 99\% of features, and then ranks the remaining features by their control effectiveness. Using the identified strategy-specific features as control vectors, SAE-Steering outperforms existing methods by over 15\% in control effectiveness. Furthermore, controlling reasoning strategies can redirect LRMs from erroneous paths to correct ones, achieving a 7\% absolute accuracy improvement. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Peter-Fy/SAE-Steering.

推理控制稀疏编码器大模型可解释性

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