arXiv:2606.24716cs.CVcs.AI2026-06中稿 · ECCV

用真人标注概念量化稀疏自编码器的可解释性,无需用户实验。

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

论文配图:Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 提出基于联盟的匹配算法,支持多对一概念映射。
  • 通过属性扰动验证,发现过高的字典大小降低可解释性。
  • 适合研究模型内部表征或评估可解释性工具的研究者。

稀疏自编码器(SAEs)被广泛用于从视觉和视觉语言模型中提取可解释概念,但现有评估方法主要依赖代理指标或定性分析,缺乏对语义对应关系的量化。本文提出一种基于人类标注的概念对齐评估框架,无需用户研究即可量化 SAE 隐变量与人工标注概念之间的匹配度,并通过定向属性扰动进行功能验证。为实现图像领域的干预式评估,构建了 synCUB 和 synCOCO 两个合成基准数据集,包含仅在一个属性上不同的成对图像。提出全二进制匹配追踪(FBMP)算法,支持多对一映射,显著优于一对一基线。引入目标属性扰动对齐分数(TAPAScore),测试匹配概念在图像级属性扰动下是否选择性且方向正确地响应。在多项合理性检查中,该匹配方法和 TAPAScore 是唯一能可靠区分训练与未训练 SAE 的指标。在 CLIP 与 DINOv2 嵌入上训练的 SAE 中,发现过高的过完备性会降低扰动对齐度,表明可解释性下降。结果表明,适度的字典规模能获得最佳可解释性平衡。代码与数据集见 https://github.com/JonasKlotz/sae-concept-eval。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence. We present a human-grounded evaluation framework that quantifies alignment between SAE latents and human-annotated concepts, without requiring user studies, and validate this matching through targeted attribute perturbations. To enable this intervention-style evaluation in vision, we construct synCUB and synCOCO, synthetic benchmarks of paired images that differ in exactly one attribute. We introduce Fully-Binary Matching Pursuit (FBMP), a coalition-based matching procedure that supports many-to-one mappings between SAE latents and annotated concepts, and consistently outperforms one-to-one baselines. For functional validation, we propose a Targeted Attribute Perturbation Alignment Score (TAPAScore), which tests whether matched concepts respond selectively and in the expected direction under targeted image-level attribute perturbations. Under sanity checks, our matching and TAPAScore are the only evaluated metrics that reliably distinguish trained SAEs from untrained ones. Across SAEs trained on CLIP and DINOv2 embeddings, we find that increased overcompleteness can reduce perturbation alignment, indicating a reduction in interpretability. Our evaluation framework suggests that moderate dictionary sizes provide the best trade-off, yielding the most interpretable SAEs. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/JonasKlotz/sae-concept-eval.

可解释性自编码器语义对齐模型评估

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