Learning from Emergence: A Study on Proactively Inhibiting the Monosemantic Neurons of Artificial Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Jiachuan, Di, Shimin, Chen, Lei, Ng, Charles Wang Wai
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Wang, Jiachuan
Di, Shimin
Chen, Lei
Ng, Charles Wang Wai
author_facet Wang, Jiachuan
Di, Shimin
Chen, Lei
Ng, Charles Wang Wai
contents Recently, emergence has received widespread attention from the research community along with the success of large-scale models. Different from the literature, we hypothesize a key factor that promotes the performance during the increase of scale: the reduction of monosemantic neurons that can only form one-to-one correlations with specific features. Monosemantic neurons tend to be sparser and have negative impacts on the performance in large models. Inspired by this insight, we propose an intuitive idea to identify monosemantic neurons and inhibit them. However, achieving this goal is a non-trivial task as there is no unified quantitative evaluation metric and simply banning monosemantic neurons does not promote polysemanticity in neural networks. Therefore, we first propose a new metric to measure the monosemanticity of neurons with the guarantee of efficiency for online computation, then introduce a theoretically supported method to suppress monosemantic neurons and proactively promote the ratios of polysemantic neurons in training neural networks. We validate our conjecture that monosemanticity brings about performance change at different model scales on a variety of neural networks and benchmark datasets in different areas, including language, image, and physics simulation tasks. Further experiments validate our analysis and theory regarding the inhibition of monosemanticity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_11560
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning from Emergence: A Study on Proactively Inhibiting the Monosemantic Neurons of Artificial Neural Networks
Wang, Jiachuan
Di, Shimin
Chen, Lei
Ng, Charles Wang Wai
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Recently, emergence has received widespread attention from the research community along with the success of large-scale models. Different from the literature, we hypothesize a key factor that promotes the performance during the increase of scale: the reduction of monosemantic neurons that can only form one-to-one correlations with specific features. Monosemantic neurons tend to be sparser and have negative impacts on the performance in large models. Inspired by this insight, we propose an intuitive idea to identify monosemantic neurons and inhibit them. However, achieving this goal is a non-trivial task as there is no unified quantitative evaluation metric and simply banning monosemantic neurons does not promote polysemanticity in neural networks. Therefore, we first propose a new metric to measure the monosemanticity of neurons with the guarantee of efficiency for online computation, then introduce a theoretically supported method to suppress monosemantic neurons and proactively promote the ratios of polysemantic neurons in training neural networks. We validate our conjecture that monosemanticity brings about performance change at different model scales on a variety of neural networks and benchmark datasets in different areas, including language, image, and physics simulation tasks. Further experiments validate our analysis and theory regarding the inhibition of monosemanticity.
title Learning from Emergence: A Study on Proactively Inhibiting the Monosemantic Neurons of Artificial Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11560