通过提升模型生成内容的意外性,有效缓解大模型自反馈导致的输出单一问题。
Learning by Surprise: Adaptive Mitigation of Model Collapse in Large Language Models
- 基于困惑度筛选高意外性文本进行微调,避免模型陷入重复生成。
- 实验表明该方法在多个数据集上显著降低令牌概率集中度,提升多样性。
- 无需区分人类或AI生成内容,适合大规模合成环境下的模型训练。
随着人工智能生成内容日益充斥网络,生成式AI模型面临自身输出作为训练数据的风险,即AI自噬现象。这种反馈循环会导致模型崩溃,表现为生成内容多样性下降。本文通过多数据集与大语言模型的广泛模拟,揭示模型崩溃的本质:一是生成分布中概率质量向少数标记集中;二是常识推理准确率显著下降。研究发现,困惑度(即模型“意外性”)是关键驱动因素——在最不“意外”的文档上微调会加剧退化。据此提出基于困惑度的过滤策略,优先选择高意外性文本进行微调。该方法无需区分人类或AI生成内容,在多个数据集和模型家族中均有效缓解模型崩溃,性能媲美甚至优于依赖人工数据的基线,同时大幅降低下一令牌概率集中度。结果为模型崩溃提供了统一、以模型为中心的理解,并提出了可扩展的实用训练策略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As AI-generated content increasingly populates the web, generative AI models are at growing risk of being trained on their own outputs, a process known as AI autophagy. This feedback loop has been shown to induce model collapse, typically characterized by a loss of diversity in generated content. However, existing work offers a limited understanding of this phenomenon and relies on mitigation strategies that assume access to human-authored data. In this paper, we conduct extensive simulations across multiple datasets and LLMs to address key gaps in the study of model collapse. First, we introduce model-intrinsic measures based on next-token probability distributions, showing that model collapse corresponds to an increasing concentration of probability mass on a small set of tokens. Second, we demonstrate that model collapse is also associated with a loss of common sense, as measured by a decline in commonsense inference accuracy. Third, we identify perplexity (a measure of model "surprise") as a key driver of collapse: fine-tuning on the least "surprising" documents leads to more severe degeneration. Building on this insight, we propose a perplexity-based filtering strategy that prioritizes high-surprise documents during fine-tuning. Unlike existing approaches, our method does not require distinguishing between human-authored and AI-generated content. Across datasets and LLM families, this strategy consistently mitigates model collapse, achieving performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, human-data baselines, while substantially reducing the concentration of next-token probabilities. Overall, our results provide a unified, model-centric understanding of model collapse and suggest practical, scalable strategies for training generative AI systems in increasingly synthetic environments.
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