English

Superposition in Transformers: A Novel Way of Building Mixture of Experts

Computation and Language 2025-01-08 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks or domains. Conventional fine-tuning often overwrites existing knowledge, causing performance degradation on original tasks. We introduce Superposition in Transformers, a novel architecture that leverages autoencoders to superimpose the hidden representations of a base model and a fine-tuned model within a shared parameter space. By using B-spline-based blending coefficients and autoencoders that adaptively reconstruct hidden states based on the input data distribution, our method effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enables a new paradigm of "in-model" superposition. This approach preserves original model capabilities while allowing compact domain-specific expertise to be added, and it supports dynamic switching between model states during inference.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.00530,
  title  = {Superposition in Transformers: A Novel Way of Building Mixture of Experts},
  author = {Ayoub Ben Chaliah and Hela Dellagi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.00530},
  year   = {2025}
}