10
Jul
arXiv:2407.06488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior multi-task capabilities, understanding the learning mechanisms behind this is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we attempt to understand such mechanisms from the perspective of neurons. Specifically, we detect task-sensitive neurons in LLMs via gradient attribution on task-specific data. Through extensive deactivation and fine-tuning experiments, we demonstrate that the detected neurons are highly correlated with the given task, which we term as task-specific neurons. With these identified task-specific neurons, we delve into two common problems in multi-task learning and continuous learning: Generalization and Catastrophic Forgetting. We…