arXiv:2411.12580cs.CLcs.LG2024-11被引 45

大模型推理靠的是程序化知识,而非直接记忆答案。

Procedural Knowledge in Pretraining Drives Reasoning in Large Language Models

  • 通过分析预训练数据,发现模型推理依赖可复用的步骤性知识
  • 推理答案和中间步骤很少在关键文档中出现,说明非简单检索
  • 适合关注大模型本质推理机制的研究者阅读

近年来,大型语言模型的能力与局限性已得到详细刻画,呈现出令人着迷又矛盾的图景:一方面,它们展现出解决问题的通用能力;另一方面,与人类相比却存在显著推理差距,引发对其泛化策略稳健性的质疑。由于模型训练使用海量数据,传统评估泛化能力的训练-测试集分离方法已不可行。为此,我们通过分析模型在执行推理任务时所依赖的预训练数据,探究其泛化策略。针对两个不同规模的模型(7B 和 35B)及 2.5B 个预训练标记,我们识别出影响三类简单数学推理任务输出的关键文档,并与回答事实问题时的高影响力数据进行对比。结果发现,尽管事实问答依赖的数据集差异较大,但同一推理任务下的不同问题常受相似文档影响,表明存在程序化知识。进一步发现,事实答案通常出现在最影响力的文档中,而推理答案及其中间步骤却很少以高影响力形式出现。对推理任务中排名靠前文档的定性分析证实,这些关键文档通常包含解题过程,如公式或代码示范。研究结果表明,模型的推理方式不同于检索,更像是一种从类似推理形式的文档中合成程序化知识的可泛化策略。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the other hand, they show surprising reasoning gaps when compared to humans, casting doubt on the robustness of their generalisation strategies. The sheer volume of data used in the design of LLMs has precluded us from applying the method traditionally used to measure generalisation: train-test set separation. To overcome this, we study what kind of generalisation strategies LLMs employ when performing reasoning tasks by investigating the pretraining data they rely on. For two models of different sizes (7B and 35B) and 2.5B of their pretraining tokens, we identify what documents influence the model outputs for three simple mathematical reasoning tasks and contrast this to the data that are influential for answering factual questions. We find that, while the models rely on mostly distinct sets of data for each factual question, a document often has a similar influence across different reasoning questions within the same task, indicating the presence of procedural knowledge. We further find that the answers to factual questions often show up in the most influential data. However, for reasoning questions the answers usually do not show up as highly influential, nor do the answers to the intermediate reasoning steps. When we characterise the top ranked documents for the reasoning questions qualitatively, we confirm that the influential documents often contain procedural knowledge, like demonstrating how to obtain a solution using formulae or code. Our findings indicate that the approach to reasoning the models use is unlike retrieval, and more like a generalisable strategy that synthesises procedural knowledge from documents doing a similar form of reasoning.

大模型推理程序化知识预训练分析

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