arXiv:2607.20652cs.LGcs.AI2026-07

让大模型内部特征可解释,通过无参数稀疏瓶颈实现高效推理。

Scaling Interpretable Transformers with Parity Bottleneck Layers

论文配图:Scaling Interpretable Transformers with Parity Bottleneck Layers
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用无参数的深度奇偶瓶颈替代传统过完备瓶颈,降低内存与计算开销。
  • 在稀疏探测任务上性能不输后验SAE,且在特征吸收和干预效果上更优。
  • 适合追求可解释性大模型的研究者,尤其关注内部机制透明化的方向。

语言模型存在超叠加现象,即残差流中表示的特征数量远超维度数。稀疏自编码器(SAEs)可用于事后恢复这些特征,但构建本征可解释模型仍不现实,因每层过完备瓶颈在内存和算力上代价过高。为此,我们提出ParityTransformer,一个类似GPT-2规模的架构,其中间表示天生高效、宽泛且稀疏。每层采用深度奇偶瓶颈(DPB),以无需参数的代数字典取代学习型过完备基,提供确定性非相干性保证,并消除阻碍大规模可解释瓶颈部署的内存需求。DPB为分层稀疏瓶颈,通过多级专家混合方法高效强制稀疏,其硬件感知实现将激活稀疏与密集训练的成本差距缩小至可接受的可解释性税水平。实验表明,ParityTransformer在稀疏探测任务上至少达到后验SAE性能,且在特征吸收、可控干预和细粒度因果操作等指标上表现更优。由于后续计算仅作用于通过稀疏瓶颈的特征,其特征天然嵌入前向传播过程,解决了SAE是否探查模型实际使用特征的问题。这标志着向设计内生可解释模型迈出关键一步。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Language models are thought to exhibit the phenomenon of superposition, representing many more features than dimensions in their residual streams. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to recover such features post-hoc, but training models that are interpretable by construction has remained impractical, as a per-layer over-complete bottleneck is prohibitively expensive in both memory and compute. To overcome this issue, we introduce the ParityTransformer, a GPT-2-scale architecture whose intermediate representations are efficient and wide / sparse by design. At each layer, a Deep Parity Bottleneck (DPB) replaces a learned over-complete basis with a parameter-free algebraic dictionary, providing a deterministic incoherence guarantee and eliminating the memory requirements that have prevented per-layer interpretable bottlenecks at scale. A DPB is a hierarchically structured sparse bottleneck which efficiently enforces sparsity using a multi-level mixture-of-experts approach: a hardware-aware implementation that closes the cost gap between activation sparse and dense training to a manageable interpretability tax. Empirically, ParityTransformers perform at least as well as post-hoc SAEs on sparse probing tasks, while out-performing on measures of feature absorption, steering effectiveness, and fine-grained causal interventions. Because subsequent computation acts only on features that survive the sparse bottleneck, the ParityTransformer's features are native to the model's forwards pass by construction, addressing the question of whether SAEs probe features the model actually uses during computation. We see this as a step toward training models whose internal representations are interpretable by design rather than recovered post hoc.

可解释性大模型稀疏瓶颈自编码器

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