发现稀疏变压器中12%~31%的权重可被全局解释。
Individual Parameters in Weight-Sparse Transformers Appear Interpretable

- 通过分析权重在哪些输入上影响预测,自动识别其作用
- 稀疏模型中12%~31%的权重有可解释的单一描述
- 适合关注模型可解释性与稀疏结构的研究者
机制可解释性的核心目标是理解神经网络如何运作以及每个组件的具体功能。主流电路发现方法聚焦特定行为,反向推导组件在子分布上的角色。但已有研究表明,组件可能在不同输入子集上表现出不同功能。本文提出通过分析权重在哪些输入上改变模型预测来全局理解单个权重的作用。我们构建了自动化大模型流水线,生成简洁的人类可读描述,并在保留文本上验证其泛化能力,仅对能泛化的描述赋予权重责任。在两个稀疏和两个密集的Transformer模型中,稀疏模型的可解释权重比例更高,剔除不可靠描述后差距进一步扩大。结果表明,稀疏模型中12%至31%的权重具有单一短描述,明确标识其用途。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does. Dominant circuit-finding approaches focus on a specific behavior and reverse-engineer the role of components on the associated sub-distribution. However, past work has shown that components can have different functions that are active on different subsets of the input distribution. In this work we ask whether a single weight can be understood globally across the full training distribution by characterizing when it matters (the inputs on which ablating it changes the model's predictions). We introduce an automated LLM pipeline that writes a short, human-readable description of when a weight matters and verifies it on held-out text, crediting a weight only if its description generalizes. Across two sparse and two dense transformers, the fraction of weights that are interpretable (in this sense) is higher in sparse transformers than in dense ones, a gap that widens once unreliable descriptions are discarded. Our results show that a meaningful fraction of a sparse transformer model's weights can be interpreted: 12 to 31% of weights have a single short description that identifies what the weight is used for.
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。