arXiv:2603.09972cs.LGcs.AI2026-03被引 6

相关性让神经网络的特征叠加不再只是干扰,而是能形成语义结构。

From Data Statistics to Feature Geometry: How Correlations Shape Superposition

  • 基于词袋模型构建相关特征的叠加机制
  • 相关特征叠加可产生建设性干扰,提升语义聚类效果
  • 解释真实语言模型中的语义环状结构,适合对模型机制感兴趣的读者

神经网络常以超完备基的形式实现特征叠加,即表示的特征数超过维度数。传统研究假设特征稀疏且不相关,认为叠加带来的是需通过非线性激活(如ReLU)滤除的干扰。本文提出受控的词袋叠加(BOWS)设置,将互联网文本的二值词袋表示嵌入叠加中。实验发现,当特征具有相关性时,干扰可转化为建设性作用:通过共激活模式组织特征,使活跃特征间干扰增强而非破坏,同时利用ReLU抑制误激活。该机制在权重衰减训练的模型中更常见,自然产生语义聚类与循环结构,解释了真实语言模型中观察到的现象,而这些现象无法用传统叠加理论说明。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A central idea in mechanistic interpretability is that neural networks represent more features than they have dimensions, arranging them in superposition to form an over-complete basis. This framing has been influential, motivating dictionary learning approaches such as sparse autoencoders. However, superposition has mostly been studied in idealized settings where features are sparse and uncorrelated. In these settings, superposition is typically understood as introducing interference that must be minimized geometrically and filtered out by non-linearities such as ReLUs, yielding local structures like regular polytopes. We show that this account is incomplete for realistic data by introducing Bag-of-Words Superposition (BOWS), a controlled setting to encode binary bag-of-words representations of internet text in superposition. Using BOWS, we find that when features are correlated, interference can be constructive rather than just noise to be filtered out. This is achieved by arranging features according to their co-activation patterns, making interference between active features constructive, while still using ReLUs to avoid false positives. We show that this kind of arrangement is more prevalent in models trained with weight decay and naturally gives rise to semantic clusters and cyclical structures which have been observed in real language models yet were not explained by the standard picture of superposition. Code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/LucasPrietoAl/correlations-feature-geometry.

神经网络特征叠加语义结构相关性

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