arXiv:2502.08550cs.CLcs.AI2025-02EMNLP被引 12

不给错误答案的解释,大模型反而学得更好。

No Need for Explanations: LLMs can implicitly learn from mistakes in-context

  • 让模型自己从错误答案中推断问题所在
  • 性能优于带详细解释的思维链提示
  • 适合提升推理能力但避免过度指导

向大型语言模型(LLMs)展示错误答案是提升其在推理任务中表现的常用策略。普遍认为,为使该策略有效,必须提供详尽的解释,明确指出错误所在并说明如何修正。然而,本文发现一个反直觉的结果:在数学推理任务中,若移除这些解释,仅提供错误答案,模型表现反而更优。该方法在不同规模和推理能力的模型上均表现出色,且显著优于链式思维提示。我们通过分析上下文长度、答案多样性及过拟合现象,发现显式纠正解释会过度约束模型,限制其自主推断高质量修正方案的能力。研究显示,错误答案本身比多样正确答案更具学习价值,而缺乏解释时模型能更有效地自我纠错。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Showing incorrect answers to Large Language Models (LLMs) is a popular strategy to improve their performance in reasoning-intensive tasks. It is widely assumed that, in order to be helpful, the incorrect answers must be accompanied by comprehensive rationales, explicitly detailing where the mistakes are and how to correct them. However, in this work we present a counterintuitive finding: we observe that LLMs perform better in math reasoning tasks when these rationales are eliminated from the context and models are left to infer on their own what makes an incorrect answer flawed. This approach also substantially outperforms chain-of-thought prompting in our evaluations. These results are consistent across LLMs of different sizes and varying reasoning abilities. To gain an understanding of why LLMs learn from mistakes more effectively without explicit corrective rationales, we perform a thorough analysis, investigating changes in context length and answer diversity between different prompting strategies, and their effect on performance. We also examine evidence of overfitting to the in-context rationales when these are provided, and study the extent to which LLMs are able to autonomously infer high-quality corrective rationales given only incorrect answers as input. We find evidence that, while incorrect answers are more beneficial for LLM learning than additional diverse correct answers, explicit corrective rationales over-constrain the model, thus limiting those benefits.

大模型推理错误学习提示工程

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