短提示下大模型推理能力下降,提出两种方法提升稳定性。
Short-Path Prompting in LLMs: Analyzing Reasoning Instability and Solutions for Robust Performance
- 研究短提示对大模型推理的影响,发现性能显著下降。
- 提出指令引导与微调两种方法,准确率大幅提升。
- 适合关注提示工程与模型鲁棒性的研究人员。
近年来,大语言模型(LLMs)的推理能力取得显著进展,主要得益于链式思维(CoT)方法,即在得出最终答案前生成中间推理步骤。当前最先进的LLMs经过指令微调,能对推理类问题提供长且详细的CoT路径。然而,人类天生倾向于简洁提示,这与需要详细推理的CoT要求产生显著冲突。本文深入分析用户使用短路径提示时,LLMs推理性能的变化。结果表明,模型在无显式CoT提示时仍能有效且稳健地推理,但在短路径提示下,推理能力大幅下降且不稳定,甚至在小学水平问题上也表现不佳。为此,本文提出两种解决方案:指令引导方法与微调方法,均能有效缓解该冲突。实验结果显示,两种方法均实现高准确率,揭示了当前模型在指令遵循与推理准确性之间的权衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent years have witnessed significant progress in large language models' (LLMs) reasoning, which is largely due to the chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, allowing models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching the final answer. Building on these advances, state-of-the-art LLMs are instruction-tuned to provide long and detailed CoT pathways when responding to reasoning-related questions. However, human beings are naturally cognitive misers and will prompt language models to give rather short responses, thus raising a significant conflict with CoT reasoning. In this paper, we delve into how LLMs' reasoning performance changes when users provide short-path prompts. The results and analysis reveal that language models can reason effectively and robustly without explicit CoT prompts, while under short-path prompting, LLMs' reasoning ability drops significantly and becomes unstable, even on grade-school problems. To address this issue, we propose two approaches: an instruction-guided approach and a fine-tuning approach, both designed to effectively manage the conflict. Experimental results show that both methods achieve high accuracy, providing insights into the trade-off between instruction adherence and reasoning accuracy in current models.
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