用稀疏自编码器引导激活正则化,解决大模型持续学习中的遗忘问题。
From Weights to Features: SAE-Guided Activation Regularization for LLM Continual Learning

- 在激活空间而非参数空间进行正则化,利用预训练SAE提取单义特征。
- 在TRACE和MedCL基准上性能超越EWC等传统方法,无需任务特定结构。
- 仅需存储紧凑的特征掩码,内存效率高,适合实际部署场景。
权重空间正则化方法如弹性权重整合(EWC)是持续学习中防止灾难性遗忘的标准方案,但在大语言模型上表现不佳。我们指出,这部分源于大模型的多义性特性:EWC依赖的逐权重要性估计过于粗粒度,无法精准保护所需知识。本文提出在模型激活空间进行正则化,使用预训练稀疏自编码器(SAE)作为单义特征词典。从约束优化视角推导出新损失函数,显式平衡稳定与可塑性,并证明EWC是单边权重空间惩罚的特例。与需要回放历史数据的方法不同,本方法仅在掩码构建后保留当前任务的紧凑SAE特征掩码,无需存储过往数据。由于特征空间维度远低于参数空间,该方法更具内存效率。在TRACE和MedCL持续学习基准上,本方法在不引入任务特定架构的前提下达到最优性能,优于传统权重空间正则化方法。此外,我们提供实证支持:任务相关表征在SAE特征基下线性可分,但在权重基下近乎随机不可区分,表明权重空间保护在概念层面几乎无选择性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Weight-space regularization methods such as Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) are the standard approach to catastrophic forgetting in continual learning. However, those methods tend to underperform when applied to large language models. We argue that such underperformance can be partly explained by the ``polysemantic'' nature of large language models: per-weight importance estimates utilized by EWC-style regularization are too coarse and cannot isolate the knowledge that needs protection. In this paper, we propose regularizing instead in the model's activation space, using pretrained Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) as a monosemantic feature dictionary. From the perspective of constrained optimization, we derive a new loss function that uses the SAE feature dictionary to explicitly balance stability and plasticity, and show that EWC is a special case in the one-sided weight-space penalty setting. Unlike replay-based methods that store or revisit examples from earlier tasks, our method requires no previous-task data after mask construction: current-task data is used to compute a compact SAE feature mask, and only this mask is retained for later training. Further, since the feature space has significantly lower dimensionality than the parameter space, the proposed method is more memory efficient. On the TRACE and MedCL continual learning benchmarks, the method achieves the strongest result among approaches without introducing task-specific architectural components, also surpassing traditional weight-space regularization methods like EWC. Beyond performance comparisons, we provide empirical evidence for the polysemanticity thesis: task-relevant representations are linearly separable in the SAE feature basis but indistinguishable from chance in the weight basis, and weight-space protection is nearly non-selective at the concept level.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。