arXiv AI By Sekh Mainul Islam, Pepa Atanasova, Isabelle Augenstein

Explaining the Roles of Experts in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs for Personalization

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The paper investigates how to personalize Large Language Models by leveraging Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, which route tokens to a few specialized experts, thereby reducing polysemanticity compared to dense models. The authors adapt three open-weight MoE LLMs on a large personalization dataset, train crosscoders to learn interpretable personalized latent representations, and identify experts that encode distinct personalization features. Experiments show that personalized MoE LLMs match dense LLM performance while activating fewer parameters, exhibit lower polysemanticity, and that causal interventions on the identified experts can steer a non-personalized model toward personalized behavior.

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