Monet: Mixture of Monosemantic Experts for Transformers

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission9736 Authors

Keywords: large language models, mechanistic interpretability, monosemanticity, mixture of experts, knowledge unlearning

Abstract: Understanding the internal computations of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for aligning them with human values and preventing undesirable behaviors like toxic content generation. However, mechanistic interpretability is hindered by *polysemanticity*—where individual neurons respond to multiple, unrelated concepts. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have attempted to disentangle these features through sparse dictionary learning, they have compromised LLM performance due to reliance on post-hoc reconstruction loss. To address this issue, we introduce **Mixture of Monosemantic Experts for Transformers (Monet)** architecture, which incorporates sparse dictionary learning directly into end-to-end Mixture-of-Experts pretraining. Our novel expert decomposition method enables scaling the expert count to 262,144 per layer while total parameters scale proportionally to the square root of the number of experts. Our analyses demonstrate mutual exclusivity of knowledge across experts and showcase the parametric knowledge encapsulated within individual experts. Moreover, **Monet** allows knowledge manipulation over domains, languages, and toxicity mitigation without degrading general performance. Our pursuit of transparent LLMs highlights the potential of scaling expert counts to enhance mechanistic interpretability and directly resect the internal knowledge to fundamentally adjust model behavior.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

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Submission Number: 9736