arXiv:2604.26866cs.CLcs.LG2026-04中稿 · COLM

发现微调时新知识会引发幻觉,通过特征筛选找回丢失的知识。

MoRFI: Monotonic Sparse Autoencoder Feature Identification

  • 用稀疏自编码器分析模型激活,识别随训练单调变化的特征。
  • 引入新知识越多、训练越久,幻觉越严重,且影响特定激活方向。
  • 方法适用于多个大模型,可单特征干预恢复部分被掩盖的知识。

大型语言模型(LLMs)在预训练阶段通过下一个词预测获得大部分事实知识。后续的后训练阶段常引入参数外的新知识,导致幻觉问题。尽管已有研究表明,在新知识上进行监督微调(SFT)可能加剧该问题,但其内在机制仍不清晰。本文在闭卷问答任务上开展受控微调实验,聚焦于单一问答数据集的七种可控混合比例,控制新知识占比与训练轮数,对 Llama 3.1 8B、Gemma 2 9B 与 Mistral 7B v03 进行微调。通过测试集性能验证:逐步引入新知识会提升幻觉率,且效果随训练时间延长更显著。我们利用预训练稀疏自编码器(SAEs)分析各检查点残差流激活,并提出单调关系特征识别(MoRFI)方法,用于捕捉对目标属性呈单调响应的潜在特征。结果表明,接触未知事实会破坏模型沿残差流某些方向检索存储知识的能力。该流程在不同模型间稳定识别出这些关键特征,通过单个潜在变量干预部分恢复被遮蔽的知识。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models (LLMs) acquire most of their factual knowledge during the pre-training stage, through next token prediction. Subsequent stages of post-training often introduce new facts outwith the parametric knowledge, giving rise to hallucinations. While it has been demonstrated that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on new knowledge may exacerbate the problem, the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. We conduct a controlled fine-tuning experiment, focusing on closed-book QA, and identify latent directions causally implicated in this degradation. Specifically, we fine-tune Llama 3.1 8B, Gemma 2 9B and Mistral 7B v03 on seven controlled mixtures of a single QA dataset, controlling for the percentage of new knowledge and number of training epochs. By measuring performance on the test set, we validate that incrementally introducing new knowledge increases hallucinations, with the effect being more pronounced with prolonged training. We leverage pre-trained sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to analyze residual stream activations across various checkpoints for each model and propose Monotonic Relationship Feature Identification (MoRFI) for capturing causally relevant latents. MoRFI filters SAE features that respond monotonically to controlled fine-tuning data mixtures of a target property. Our findings are consistent with exposure to unknown facts disrupting the model's ability to retrieve stored knowledge along a set of directions in the residual stream. Our pipeline reliably discovers them across distinct models, partially recovering lost knowledge through single-latent interventions.

大模型幻觉特征识别自编码器

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