Mingxue Tian
Author directory2026
MoE Sparsity Begets Monosemanticity: Insights into Understanding and Fine-Tuning
Mingxue Tian | Qi Zhang | Xiaohan Wang | Jiajun Chai | Guojun Yin | Wei Lin | Cailian Chen | Qimin Xu | Siyu Wang | Yisen Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mingxue Tian | Qi Zhang | Xiaohan Wang | Jiajun Chai | Guojun Yin | Wei Lin | Cailian Chen | Qimin Xu | Siyu Wang | Yisen Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures enhance the scalability and efficiency of large language models (LLMs) by activating only a subset of parameters. However, the interpretability of individual experts and corresponding strategies for post-training adaptation to domain-specific tasks remain underexplored. In this work, we develop an interpretability framework for expert-level monosemanticity in MoE models, drawing inspiration from sparse autoencoders and offering new insights into the specialization patterns of domain experts. We demonstrate that the inherent sparsity of MoE models encourages stronger monosemantic behavior at the expert level, which allows for the identification of experts responsible for particular downstream tasks and aids in preserving cross-domain performance. Building on this, we propose an expert-frozen fine-tuning method that selectively updates domain-specific experts while freezing the rest, which also alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Experiments on specialized domains, including medicine and finance, show that our approach performs on par with or better than fully fine-tuned models on in-domain tasks, while achieving relative improvements of 19.58% and 37.09% in retaining performance on out-of-domain benchmarks. We also demonstrate consistent advantages over PEFT baselines such as LoRA, achieving relative improvements of 11.49% and 8.60% in other domains.