让语言模型在训练时就可解释,规模越大越清晰。
Scaling Inherently Interpretable Language Models

- 训练时同步优化可解释性,而非事后解释。
- 模型规模扩大后概念更解耦、更贴近人类理解。
- 无需重训即可通过概念调控纠正输出,适合可控生成场景。
可解释性常被视为能力的代价:语言模型先被训练为黑箱,再通过难以验证的方法事后解释。本文挑战这一前提,将可解释性作为训练过程的约束,与语言建模目标一同优化。在三个数量级的计算量下,无论自回归还是扩散语言模型,可解释性都随能力提升而增强,而非削弱。令人惊讶的是,随着模型规模增大,其表示变得更加解耦,并与人类可理解的概念对齐。我们以Steerling-8B为例,这是一种带有因果注意力掩码的扩散语言模型,能为任意生成的词元组明确归因于相关输入词元、人类可理解的概念和训练数据。这实现了闭环干预:通过概念归因诊断输出,检索相似训练数据,并通过概念调制修正行为,无需重新训练。尽管仅使用2-16倍少的计算量,Steerling-8B仍与同行开放模型性能相当,表明一种新范式:可解释性可嵌入训练过程,且随规模提升而改善。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Interpretability is often treated as a tax on capability: language models are trained as opaque systems, then explained after the fact, with methods whose reliability is difficult to establish. In this work, we challenge this premise. Rather than reverse-engineering a model, we make interpretability a constraint of the training pipeline, optimized alongside the language modeling objective. Across three orders of magnitude of compute, on both autoregressive and diffusion language models, interpretability scales with capability rather than against it. Surprisingly, model representations become more disentangled and aligned with human-understandable concepts with scale. We instantiate the training-time recipe with Steerling-8B, a diffusion language model with a causal attention mask. For any group of generated tokens, Steerling-8B attributes the output to relevant input tokens, human-understandable concepts, and training data. This enables closed-loop intervention: diagnose an output through its concept or feature attribution, retrieve similar training data, and correct the behavior through concept steering without retraining. Steerling-8B remains competitive with open peer models trained on substantially 2-16x more compute, suggesting a different scaling paradigm: interpretability can be designed into training, and it improves with scale.
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