arXiv:2607.01799cs.LGcs.AI2026-07

用稀疏结构压缩自编码器,大幅降低参数量同时保持解释性。

Expander Sparse Autoencoders: Parameter-Efficient Dictionaries for Mechanistic Interpretability

  • 采用扩展图掩码实现稀疏解码器,仅需少量参数即可完成特征分解
  • 在Qwen2.5-3B上仅用7个连接,参数减少293倍,保留84%的重建精度
  • 适合追求高效可解释性的大模型分析研究者使用

稀疏自编码器(SAE)通过学习一个过完备字典 $\mathbf{W}\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$($m<n$),将神经网络内部激活表示为稀疏代码 $\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^n$ 的线性组合,从而实现机制可解释性。传统方法依赖稠密解码器,需存储 $O(mn)$ 个参数,在大规模场景下成本高昂。本文提出扩展型稀疏自编码器(Expander SAEs):其解码器与绑定编码器基于左-$d$-正则扩展图掩码构建,仅需 $dn$ 个可学习参数,而保持稀疏编码问题 $(m,n,k)$ 不变。该结构使匹配追踪中的相关计算 $\mathbf{W}^\top \mathbf{r}$ 从 $O(mn)$ 降为 $O(dn)$ 的收集-归约操作。实验表明,在 Pythia-70M/160M、Qwen2.5-3B 及 Llama-3.2-1B 的残差流激活上,调整 $d$ 可描绘出稳定的存储-保真度权衡曲线;在现代大模型最紧凑设置下,Qwen2.5-3B 使用 $d=7$ 时,解码器参数量仅为全稠密解码器的 $\frac{1}{293}$,仍能恢复 $84\%$ 的密集解码器损失。控制实验显示,性能提升源于稀疏且多样的解码器支撑结构,而非参数量减少本身;当稀疏与稠密解码器参数量相当时,剩余差距部分源于编码器的参数摊销效应。理论上,我们证明了扩张性与列平坦性足以保证无噪声 $k$-稀疏码的可辨识性,并推导出在何种条件下正交匹配追踪(OMP)可精确恢复支持集。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose internal activations of neural networks into sparse linear combinations of learned features by fitting an overcomplete dictionary $\mathbf{W}\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ with $m<n$, and inferring a sparse code $\mathbf{x}\in\mathbb{R}^n$ from $\mathbf{h}\approx\mathbf{W}\mathbf{x}$. This inference problem closely resembles the canonical setup of compressed sensing, but dense decoders requires $O(mn)$ learned values, which becomes costly at large feature counts. We introduce Expander SAEs: TopK SAEs whose decoder and tied encoder are supported on a left-$d$-regular expander mask with $d\ll m$, learning only $dn$ decoder values while keeping the sparse-coding problem $(m,n,k)$ fixed. The same structure reduces storage and turns the matching-pursuit correlation step $\mathbf{W}^\top \mathbf{r}$ in OMP into an $O(dn)$ gather-and-reduce operation. Our experiments show that across Pythia-70M/160M, Qwen2.5-3B, and Llama-3.2-1B residual-stream activations, varying $d$ traces a consistent storage--fidelity frontier, and that at the most compressed modern-LM setting, Qwen2.5-3B with $d=7$ uses $293\times$ fewer learned decoder values than the full dense decoder while retaining $84$% of dense CE-loss recovered. Control experiments show that the improved storage--fidelity tradeoff is driven by sparse, diverse decoder support structure rather than by fewer learned decoder values, and that when sparse and dense decoders are compared at matched parameter count, part of the remaining gap comes from encoder amortisation. On the theoretical side, we show that expansion and column flatness are sufficient for identifiability of noiseless $k$-sparse codes, and we derive complementary sufficient conditions under which OMP recovers the support exactly.

稀疏自编码器可解释性参数效率扩展图

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