arXiv:2409.14057cs.CL2024-09NeurIPS被引 13

语言模型易学词语共现而非真实事实,本文提出方法让其真正理解事实。

Co-occurrence is not Factual Association in Language Models

  • 区分中间层共现统计与底层真实事实表示
  • 隐含事实训练使新知识泛化能力提升显著
  • 遗忘共现统计可增强事实学习,适合知识推理场景

预训练语言模型虽能编码大量知识并用于推理任务,但在有限文本示范下微调时仍难以有效学习新事实知识。本文揭示其根本原因在于模型倾向于学习词语共现统计而非真实事实关联。我们发现:共现统计存在于Transformer中间层,泛化能力差,仅适用于简单问答;而真实事实关联存在于低层,可自由用于各类推理。基于此,提出两种改进策略:使用隐含事实而非显式陈述的文本进行训练,可迫使模型学习事实关联,显著提升知识泛化;另提出一种简单训练方法主动遗忘共现统计,从而在普通叙事文本微调中解锁并增强事实学习能力。在合成与真实语料上,两种策略均显著提升微调知识在间接、多跳问答等推理场景中的泛化表现。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Pretrained language models can encode a large amount of knowledge and utilize it for various reasoning tasks, yet they can still struggle to learn novel factual knowledge effectively from finetuning on limited textual demonstrations. In this work, we show that the reason for this deficiency is that language models are biased to learn word co-occurrence statistics instead of true factual associations. We identify the differences between two forms of knowledge representation in language models: knowledge in the form of co-occurrence statistics is encoded in the middle layers of the transformer model and does not generalize well to reasoning scenarios beyond simple question answering, while true factual associations are encoded in the lower layers and can be freely utilized in various reasoning tasks. Based on these observations, we propose two strategies to improve the learning of factual associations in language models. We show that training on text with implicit rather than explicit factual associations can force the model to learn factual associations instead of co-occurrence statistics, significantly improving the generalization of newly learned knowledge. We also propose a simple training method to actively forget the learned co-occurrence statistics, which unblocks and enhances the learning of factual associations when training on plain narrative text. On both synthetic and real-world corpora, the two proposed strategies improve the generalization of the knowledge learned during finetuning to reasoning scenarios such as indirect and multi-hop question answering.

语言模型事实学习知识推理

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