Guojun Ma


2025

pdf bib
Route Sparse Autoencoder to Interpret Large Language Models
Wei Shi | Sihang Li | Tao Liang | Mingyang Wan | Guojun Ma | Xiang Wang | Xiangnan He
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable and monosemantic features. However, prior works primarily focus on feature extraction from a single layer, failing to effectively capture activations that span multiple layers. In this paper, we introduce Route Sparse Autoencoder (RouteSAE), a new framework that integrates a routing mechanism with a shared SAE to efficiently extract features from multiple layers. It dynamically assigns weights to activations from different layers, incurring minimal parameter overhead while achieving high interpretability and flexibility for targeted feature manipulation. We evaluate RouteSAE through extensive experiments on Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct. Specifically, under the same sparsity constraint of 64, RouteSAE extracts 22.5% more features than baseline SAEs while achieving a 22.3% higher interpretability score. These results underscore the potential of RouteSAE as a scalable and effective method for LLM interpretability, with applications in feature discovery and model intervention. Our codes are available at https://github.com/swei2001/RouteSAEs.

pdf bib
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts
Ming Zhang | Yuhui Wang | Yujiong Shen | Tingyi Yang | Changhao Jiang | Yilong Wu | Shihan Dou | Qinhao Chen | Zhiheng Xi | Zhihao Zhang | Yi Dong | Zhen Wang | Zhihui Fei | Mingyang Wan | Tao Liang | Guojun Ma | Qi Zhang | Tao Gui | Xuanjing Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Process-driven dialogue systems, which operate under strict predefined process constraints, are essential in customer service and equipment maintenance scenarios. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, they still struggle to solve these strictly constrained dialogue tasks. To address this challenge, we construct Process Flow Dialogue (PFDial) dataset, which contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions derived from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. Based on PlantUML specification, each UML flowchart is converted into atomic dialogue units i.e., structured five-tuples. Experimental results demonstrate that a 7B model trained with merely 800 samples, and a 0.5B model trained on total data both can surpass 90% accuracy. Additionally, the 8B model can surpass GPT-4o up to 43.88% with an average of 11.00%. We further evaluate models’ performance on challenging backward transitions in process flows and conduct an in-depth analysis of various dataset formats to reveal their impact on model performance in handling decision and sequential branches. The data is released in https://github.com/KongLongGeFDU/PFDial.