arXiv:2605.05341cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

解决稀疏自编码器中神经元失效问题,提升模型稳定性与可解释性。

Feature Starvation as Geometric Instability in Sparse Autoencoders

论文配图:Feature Starvation as Geometric Instability in Sparse Autoencoders
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 引入自适应弹性网络结构,结合L2正则与动态L1重加权。
  • 在Pythia 70M和Llama 3.1 8B上显著缓解神经元失效问题。
  • 理论证明具有连续稀疏编码映射,适合大模型可解释性研究。

稀疏自编码器(SAEs)用于将大语言模型(LLMs)的密集、多义内部表征解耦为可解释的单义概念。然而,标准ℓ₁正则化SAEs存在特征饥饿(死神经元)和收缩偏差问题,常需计算成本高昂的启发式重采样及不可导的硬掩码方法来应对。我们认为,特征饥饿不仅是数据多样性不足的副产物,更是过完备词典下ℓ₁诱导稀疏编码映射的优化-几何病态:其与浅层、摊销编码器本质不匹配。为此,我们提出自适应弹性网SAE(AEN-SAE),一种基于经典稀疏回归的全可导架构。AEN-SAE结合ℓ₂结构项以保证强凸性和Lipschitz稳定性,并通过自适应ℓ₁重加权消除收缩偏差、抑制虚假特征,从而联合调控诱导多面体几何的曲率与交互结构。理论上,我们证明了AEN-SAE能实现Lipschitz连续稀疏编码映射,并在弱假设下恢复全局特征支持。实验上,在合成场景及LLMs(Pythia 70M、Llama 3.1 8B)中,AEN-SAE无需辅助启发式方法即可缓解特征饥饿,同时保持良好的重建性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to disentangle the dense, polysemantic internal representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable, monosemantic concepts. However, standard $\ell_1$-regularized SAEs suffer from feature starvation (dead neurons) and shrinkage bias, often requiring computationally expensive heuristic resampling and nondifferentiable hard-masking methods to bypass these challenges. We argue that feature starvation is not merely an empirical artifact of poor data diversity, but a fundamental optimization-geometric pathology of overcomplete dictionaries: the $\ell_1$-induced sparse coding map is unstable and fundamentally misaligned with shallow, amortized encoders. To address this structural instability, we introduce adaptive elastic net SAEs (AEN-SAEs), a fully differentiable architecture grounded in classical sparse regression. AEN-SAEs combine an $\ell_2$ structural term that enforces strong convexity and Lipschitz stability with adaptive $\ell_1$ reweighting that eliminates shrinkage bias and suppresses spurious features, thereby jointly controlling the curvature and interaction structure of the induced polyhedral geometry. Theoretically, we show that AEN-SAEs yield a Lipschitz-continuous sparse coding map and recover the global feature support under mild assumptions. Empirically, across synthetic settings and LLMs (Pythia 70M, Llama 3.1 8B), AEN-SAEs mitigate feature starvation without auxiliary heuristics while maintaining competitive reconstruction abilities.

稀疏编码大模型可解释性自编码器优化几何

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