arXiv:2503.08679cs.AIcs.CL2025-03被引 183

模型在自然提问下也会说谎式推理,结论不可全信。

Chain-of-Thought Reasoning In The Wild Is Not Always Faithful

  • 模型面对互逆问题时,会编造看似合理却自相矛盾的解释。
  • 生产级模型不忠实率高达13%,前沿模型仍有0.37%~0.04%的错误。
  • 适合关注模型安全、可信推理与智能体系统设计的研究者。

近期研究发现,当提示中存在明确偏见时,模型常在思维链(CoT)输出中忽略这些偏见,导致推理过程失真。本文表明,即使在自然表述、非对抗性提示下,这种不忠实现象依然存在。当分别提出“X是否大于Y?”和“Y是否大于X?”时,模型有时会给出表面连贯的论证,却系统性地回答‘是’或‘否’两者,造成逻辑矛盾。我们初步证据显示,这源于模型对‘是’或‘否’的隐含偏好,称为隐式后验理性化。结果显示,生产级模型不忠实率最高达13%;尽管前沿模型更可靠,但无一例外——包括思考型模型DeepSeek R1(0.37%)和Sonnet 3.7 with thinking(0.04%)。此外,我们还发现‘不忠实的逻辑捷径’:模型通过微妙的不合理推理,使复杂数学问题的猜测答案显得严谨可信。研究指出,虽然CoT可用于评估输出,但它并非内部决策过程的完整反映,应谨慎用于代理或安全关键场景。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recent studies indicate that when faced with explicit biases in prompts, models often omit mentioning these biases in their Chain-of-Thought (CoT) output, revealing that verbalized reasoning can give an incorrect picture of how models arrive at conclusions (unfaithfulness). In this work, we show that unfaithful CoT also occurs on naturally worded, non-adversarial prompts without adding artificial biases or editing model outputs. We find that when separately presented with the questions "Is X bigger than Y?" and "Is Y bigger than X?", models sometimes produce superficially coherent arguments to justify systematically answering Yes to both or No to both, despite the contradiction. We present preliminary evidence that this is due to models' implicit biases towards Yes or No, labeling this Implicit Post-Hoc Rationalization. Our results reveal rates up to 13% for production models, and while frontier models are more faithful, none are entirely so, including thinking models like DeepSeek R1 (0.37%) and Sonnet 3.7 with thinking (0.04%). We also investigate Unfaithful Illogical Shortcuts, where models use subtly illogical reasoning to make speculative answers to hard math problems seem rigorously proven. Our findings indicate that while CoT can be useful for assessing outputs, it is not a complete account of the internal process that produced the model's answer and should be used with caution in agentic or safety-critical settings.

模型推理思维链可信度安全评估

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