arXiv:2601.22928cs.CLcs.LG2026-01被引 2

检验大模型语义理解机制,发现常用解释方法存在根本缺陷。

LLMs Explain't: A Post-Mortem on Semantic Interpretability in Transformer Models

  • 通过词元关系探测和特征映射验证语义抽象
  • 注意力机制与嵌入层均未可靠体现语义信息
  • 警示研究者勿轻信现有可解释性方法

大语言模型在普适计算中广泛应用,但其卓越性能的内在机制仍不清晰。本文探究语言抽象如何在模型各模块(注意力头与输入嵌入)中形成,采用两种主流可解释性方法:(1) 探测词元级关系结构,(2) 利用嵌入作为人类可解释属性的载体进行特征映射。两者均因方法论问题失败:注意力解释在验证后期表示仍对应词元的核心假设时崩溃;嵌入属性推断的高预测得分实由方法论偏差与数据集结构驱动,非真实语义知识。这些失败至关重要,因上述方法常被视作模型理解能力的证据,但结果表明此类推断缺乏依据。该局限在普适与分布式计算场景中尤为关键,此时模型依赖解释技术进行调试、压缩与说明。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in pervasive computing due to their versatility and strong performance. However, despite their ubiquitous use, the exact mechanisms underlying their outstanding performance remain unclear. Different methods for LLM explainability exist, and many are, as a method, not fully understood themselves. We started with the question of how linguistic abstraction emerges in LLMs, aiming to detect it across different LLM modules (attention heads and input embeddings). For this, we used methods well-established in the literature: (1) probing for token-level relational structures, and (2) feature-mapping using embeddings as carriers of human-interpretable properties. Both attempts failed for different methodological reasons: Attention-based explanations collapsed once we tested the core assumption that later-layer representations still correspond to tokens. Property-inference methods applied to embeddings also failed because their high predictive scores were driven by methodological artifacts and dataset structure rather than meaningful semantic knowledge. These failures matter because both techniques are widely treated as evidence for what LLMs supposedly understand, yet our results show such conclusions are unwarranted. These limitations are particularly relevant in pervasive and distributed computing settings where LLMs are deployed as system components and interpretability methods are relied upon for debugging, compression, and explaining models.

可解释性大模型语义分析

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