arXiv:2607.08605cs.CVcs.AI2026-07

让跨模态神经元学出一致概念,提升可解释性

When Structured Sparse Autoencoders Learn Consistent Concepts Across Modalities

论文配图:When Structured Sparse Autoencoders Learn Consistent Concepts Across Modalities
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用注意力与空间位置分组图像块,引入结构化稀疏正则
  • 视觉概念更连贯,语义对齐提升6.06%,表示效率提高60.81
  • 适合研究模型可解释性、多模态对齐的学者使用

稀疏自编码器(SAEs)通过在大模型中学习一组稀疏潜在特征,为机制可解释性提供了新途径,每个特征对应一个独立概念。然而,在视觉-语言模型中,原始SAE难以学习跨模态一致的概念,视觉模态中概念常呈现碎片化覆盖(即不连续区域)。为此,本文提出结构化稀疏自编码器(S²AE),从语义和空间两个维度强制视觉模态中的概念一致性。具体地,基于Transformer注意力相似性和空间邻近性对图像块进行分组,并在训练过程中引入结构化稀疏正则:组间采用排斥性稀疏以实现概念解耦,组内采用组稀疏以保证概念一致性,促使自编码器的潜在神经元专注于独特且语义有根基的概念。在Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct模型上的评估显示,该方法使语义对齐(mIoU)平均提升6.06%,表示效率(更低的l0范数)达60.81,同时保持极高重建保真度(解释方差高于99%)。跨模态分析进一步表明,该结构先验提升了神经元单义性,双模态语义一致性平均提升3.08%,单义性得分平均提升2.37%,从而促进更连贯、解耦的表示。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for mechanistic interpretability by learning a set of sparse latent features in large models, each of which encodes a distinct concept. However, in vision-language models (VLMs), vanilla SAEs struggle to learn modality-consistent concepts, with concepts often exhibiting fragmented coverage (i.e., disjoint regions) in the visual modality. To address this challenge, we propose a Structured Sparse AutoEncoder ($S^2AE$) that enforces concept consistency from both semantic and spatial perspectives in the visual modality. Specifically, we group image patches based on Transformer attention similarity and spatial proximity, and introduce a structured sparsity regularization when training the vanilla SAE. The regularization consists of exclusive sparsity for inter-group concept disentanglement and group sparsity for intra-group concept consistency, which drives the latent neurons by SAEs to specialize in distinct, semantically grounded concepts. Evaluated on the \texttt{Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct} model, the method achieves 6.06% average improvement in semantic alignment (mIoU) and 60.81 in representational efficiency (lower l0 norm) while maintaining near-perfect reconstruction fidelity with an Explained Variance above 99%. Cross-modal analysis further demonstrates that $S^2AE$ enhances neuronal monosemanticity by this visual structural prior, achieving a 3.08% average gain in semantic consistency and a 2.37% average gain in monosemanticity scores for both modalities of multimodal features, thereby fostering more coherent and disentangled representations.

可解释性稀疏编码多模态自编码器

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