通过降低专家间表示相似性,提升MoE模型解释的可信度。
Does Role Specialization Matter for Explanation Faithfulness in Mixture-of-Experts?
- 引入表示层面去相关正则化,减少专家间特征重叠。
- 在多模态基准上,解释可信度指标均显著提升。
- 该方法适用于各类MoE架构,不依赖特定角色设计。
Mixture-of-Experts(MoE)架构近年引入基于角色的可解释性机制,例如在多模态场景中为专家分配协同、冗余、独特等语义角色。然而,这种结构化角色分解是否能维持整体架构的解释可信度仍缺乏研究。我们假设:专家间表示重叠会削弱有效角色分离,即使语义角色明确定义也会降低基于归因的解释可信度。为此,我们提出表示层面去相关正则化,显式减少潜在空间中专家间的相似性,以促进更清晰的角色专一化。实验表明,在多个多模态基准上,该方法显著提升了解释可信度,涵盖充分性、必要性及扰动曲线下面积(AOPC)等指标,同时保持任务性能。该改进不仅限于角色驱动架构如I2MoE,标准稀疏MoE基线也呈现类似趋势,表明表示层面分离或可成为提升MoE系统解释可信度的通用机制。结果表明,仅靠结构角色分解不足以保证可信解释,表示分离是关键增强手段。代码与补充材料已公开于https://github.com/dut0817/FL-I2MoE_Decor。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have recently been extended with role-based mechanisms for interpretability. This is typically done by assigning semantic roles to individual expert components, for example roles like synergy, redundancy, and uniqueness in multimodal settings. However, whether such structural role decomposition preserves explanation faithfulness of the overall architecture remains largely underexplored. We hypothesize that inter-expert representation overlap weakens effective role separation and degrades attribution-based faithfulness, even when semantic roles are explicitly defined. To address this limitation, we introduce representation-level decorrelation regularization to explicitly reduce inter-expert similarity in latent space. Using representation decorrelation objectives, we encourage clearer specialization among experts by minimizing representation overlap. Our experiments show that across multiple multimodal benchmarks, this separation consistently improves explanation faithfulness, as measured by comprehensiveness, sufficiency, and their Area Over the Perturbation Curve (AOPC) summaries, while preserving task performance. We further show that these improvements are not limited to role-based architectures such as Interpretable Multimodal Interaction-aware MoE (I2MoE). Similar trends are observed in a standard sparse MoE baseline, suggesting that representation-level separation may provide a more general mechanism for enhancing explanation faithfulness in MoE systems. Overall, our findings suggest that structural role decomposition alone may be insufficient to guarantee faithful explanations and that representation-level separation helps improve explanation faithfulness. To support reproducibility, the source code and supplementary material are publicly available at https://github.com/dut0817/FL-I2MoE_Decor.
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