缺少前提的问题让大模型过度思考,反而丧失判断力。
Missing Premise exacerbates Overthinking: Are Reasoning Models losing Critical Thinking Skill?
- 用缺失前提的问题测试模型,发现推理模型会无意义地延长回答。
- 非专门训练的模型反而更短更准,说明当前训练方式有问题。
- 过长推理会传染,适合研究模型认知缺陷与高效推理的人看。
我们发现,无论采用强化学习还是监督学习训练的推理型大模型,在面对缺少前提条件的模糊问题(MiP)时,响应长度急剧增加,产生冗余且无效的思考过程。这一新场景显著加剧了普遍存在的过度思考问题,我们称之为 MiP-Overthinking。此类失败违背了‘测试时缩放定律’,在多个自建的含 MiP 数据集上广泛出现,揭示了廉价过度思考的危害及批判性思维的缺失。令人意外的是,未专门针对推理训练的模型在 MiP 场景下表现更好,响应更短且能快速识别出问题不成立。这暴露了当前推理模型训练方法的关键缺陷:未能充分鼓励高效思考,导致思维模式被滥用。通过细粒度分析推理长度、过度思考模式及关键判断位置,我们进一步揭示了该问题成因。扩展消融实验还发现,过度思考可通过推理模型的蒸馏过程传播。这些结果深化了对过度思考的理解,并为缓解该问题提供了新视角。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We find that the response length of reasoning LLMs, whether trained by reinforcement learning or supervised learning, drastically increases for ill-posed questions with missing premises (MiP), ending up with redundant and ineffective thinking. This newly introduced scenario exacerbates the general overthinking issue to a large extent, which we name as the MiP-Overthinking. Such failures are against the ``test-time scaling law'' but have been widely observed on multiple datasets we curated with MiP, indicating the harm of cheap overthinking and a lack of critical thinking. Surprisingly, LLMs not specifically trained for reasoning exhibit much better performance on the MiP scenario, producing much shorter responses that quickly identify ill-posed queries. This implies a critical flaw of the current training recipe for reasoning LLMs, which does not encourage efficient thinking adequately, leading to the abuse of thinking patterns. To further investigate the reasons behind such failures, we conduct fine-grained analyses of the reasoning length, overthinking patterns, and location of critical thinking on different types of LLMs. Moreover, our extended ablation study reveals that the overthinking is contagious through the distillation of reasoning models' responses. These results improve the understanding of overthinking and shed novel insights into mitigating the problem.
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