arXiv:2602.01695cs.AIcs.LG2026-02

提出稀疏转换器让大模型推理过程可检查可干预。

Beyond Dense States: Sparse Transcoders as Causally Testable Operators for LLM Latent Reasoning

  • 用稀疏特征路径+线性直连设计可解释的推理转换器。
  • 删掉少数活跃稀疏特征,准确率下降16.5%,证明其因果作用。
  • 适合想理解或控制大模型推理过程的研究者。

隐式推理通过连续潜在状态替代显式中间词元,降低生成成本。但现有方法依赖密集且纠缠的状态转移,难以观测或干预。本文提出LSTR框架,将后验诊断用的稀疏转换器变为推理过程中可干预的组件。每个潜在步骤中,潜在转移转换器(LTT)结合线性跳接路径与Top-k稀疏创新路径,仅激活少量稀疏特征。在匹配压缩设置下,LSTR提供了机制可解释的替代方案。在GSM8K-Aug上,仅删去少数最活跃的稀疏特征,准确率最高下降16.5%;而密集基线的类似干预影响小得多。这表明活跃稀疏特征在潜在转移中起因果作用,而非事后描述。数学基准和StrategyQA上的额外实验表明,稀疏潜在转移既能保持压缩优势,又使轨迹更可检查、可干预。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Latent reasoning reduces the token-generation cost of chain-of-thought reasoning by replacing explicit intermediate tokens with continuous latent transitions. However, existing latent reasoning methods usually rely on dense and entangled transitions, making their reasoning trajectories difficult to inspect or intervene on. We introduce LSTR (Latent Sparse Transcoder Reasoning), a framework that turns sparse transcoders from post-hoc diagnostic tools into in-loop, intervenable transition components for latent reasoning. At each latent step, a Latent Transition Transcoder (LTT) combines a linear skip path with a Top-k sparse innovation path, exposing a small set of active sparse features. Under matched compression settings, LSTR offers a mechanistically inspectable alternative to dense latent reasoning. On GSM8K-Aug, ablating only a few top-active sparse features reduces accuracy by up to 16.5%, whereas analogous interventions have much smaller effects in dense latent baselines. These results indicate that the active sparse features are causally involved in the latent transition process, rather than merely post-hoc descriptors. Additional experiments on mathematical benchmarks and StrategyQA suggest that sparse latent transitions can preserve the compression benefits of latent reasoning while making the resulting trajectories more inspectable and intervenable.

大模型推理稀疏表示可解释性

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