Unraveling Babel: Exploring Multilingual Activation Patterns of LLMs and Their Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Weize, Xu, Yinlong, Xu, Hongxia, Chen, Jintai, Hu, Xuming, Wu, Jian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Liu, Weize
Xu, Yinlong
Xu, Hongxia
Chen, Jintai
Hu, Xuming
Wu, Jian
author_facet Liu, Weize
Xu, Yinlong
Xu, Hongxia
Chen, Jintai
Hu, Xuming
Wu, Jian
contents Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous breakthroughs in the field of NLP, but still lack understanding of their internal neuron activities when processing different languages. We designed a method to convert dense LLMs into fine-grained MoE architectures, and then visually studied the multilingual activation patterns of LLMs through expert activation frequency heatmaps. Through comprehensive experiments on different model families, different model sizes, and different variants, we analyzed the similarities and differences in the internal neuron activation patterns of LLMs when processing different languages. Specifically, we investigated the distribution of high-frequency activated experts, multilingual shared experts, whether multilingual activation patterns are related to language families, and the impact of instruction tuning on activation patterns. We further explored leveraging the discovered differences in expert activation frequencies to guide sparse activation and pruning. Experimental results demonstrated that our method significantly outperformed random expert pruning and even exceeded the performance of unpruned models in some languages. Additionally, we found that configuring different pruning rates for different layers based on activation level differences could achieve better results. Our findings reveal the multilingual processing mechanisms within LLMs and utilize these insights to offer new perspectives for applications such as sparse activation and model pruning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unraveling Babel: Exploring Multilingual Activation Patterns of LLMs and Their Applications
Liu, Weize
Xu, Yinlong
Xu, Hongxia
Chen, Jintai
Hu, Xuming
Wu, Jian
Computation and Language
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous breakthroughs in the field of NLP, but still lack understanding of their internal neuron activities when processing different languages. We designed a method to convert dense LLMs into fine-grained MoE architectures, and then visually studied the multilingual activation patterns of LLMs through expert activation frequency heatmaps. Through comprehensive experiments on different model families, different model sizes, and different variants, we analyzed the similarities and differences in the internal neuron activation patterns of LLMs when processing different languages. Specifically, we investigated the distribution of high-frequency activated experts, multilingual shared experts, whether multilingual activation patterns are related to language families, and the impact of instruction tuning on activation patterns. We further explored leveraging the discovered differences in expert activation frequencies to guide sparse activation and pruning. Experimental results demonstrated that our method significantly outperformed random expert pruning and even exceeded the performance of unpruned models in some languages. Additionally, we found that configuring different pruning rates for different layers based on activation level differences could achieve better results. Our findings reveal the multilingual processing mechanisms within LLMs and utilize these insights to offer new perspectives for applications such as sparse activation and model pruning.
title Unraveling Babel: Exploring Multilingual Activation Patterns of LLMs and Their Applications
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16367