{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/encourage-or-inhibit-monosemanticity-revisit","title":"Encourage or Inhibit Monosemanticity? Revisit Monosemanticity from a Feature Decorrelation Perspective","arxiv_id":"2406.17969","date":"2024-06-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hanqi Yan","Yanzheng Xiang","Guangyi Chen","Yifei Wang","Lin Gui","Yulan He"],"abstract":"To better interpret the intrinsic mechanism of large language models (LLMs), recent studies focus on monosemanticity on its basic units. A monosemantic neuron is dedicated to a single and specific concept, which forms a one-to-one correlation between neurons and concepts. Despite extensive research in monosemanticity probing, it remains unclear whether monosemanticity is beneficial or harmful to model capacity. To explore this question, we revisit monosemanticity from the feature decorrelation perspective and advocate for its encouragement. We experimentally observe that the current conclusion by wang2024learning, which suggests that decreasing monosemanticity enhances model performance, does not hold when the model changes. Instead, we demonstrate that monosemanticity consistently exhibits a positive correlation with model capacity, in the preference alignment process. Consequently, we apply feature correlation as a proxy for monosemanticity and incorporate a feature decorrelation regularizer into the dynamic preference optimization process. The experiments show that our method not only enhances representation diversity and activation sparsity but also improves preference alignment performance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17969v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.17969v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"encourage-or-inhibit-monosemanticity-revisit","repo_url":"https://github.com/hanqi-qi/revisit_monosemanticity","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"feature-correlation","task_name":"Feature Correlation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2406.17969","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.17969","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2406.17969"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/hanqi-qi/revisit_monosemanticity","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ee99883aeb2d0c23","entry":"singular_spectrum","repo":"hanqi-qi/revisit_monosemanticity","repo_kind":"official","path":"feature_decorr/extract_acts.py","file_url":"https://github.com/hanqi-qi/revisit_monosemanticity/blob/HEAD/feature_decorr/extract_acts.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ee99883aeb2d0c23"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}