arXiv:2505.11423cs.CL2025-05NeurIPS被引 59

推理反而让大模型更不听指令,研究发现并提出解决方法。

When Thinking Fails: The Pitfalls of Reasoning for Instruction-Following in LLMs

  • 通过注意力分析发现,推理会分散模型对指令关键部分的关注。
  • 在两个基准上,启用思维链后指令遵循准确率显著下降。
  • 提出选择性推理策略,尤其分类器选优法能有效恢复性能。

增强推理的大语言模型(RLLMs)在复杂推理任务中表现优异,但本文揭示了一个此前未被关注的现象:显式思维链(CoT)推理会严重降低指令遵循的准确性。我们在15个模型上评估了两个基准:IFEval(含简单、可验证规则)和ComplexBench(含复杂组合约束),结果一致显示,使用CoT提示会导致性能下降。通过大规模案例分析与基于注意力的解析,我们识别出推理有时帮助(如格式或词汇精准度提升),有时却损害(如忽略简单约束或引入无关内容)。为此提出约束注意力指标量化模型关注点,发现CoT常使注意力偏离指令相关标记。为缓解此问题,我们引入并评估四种策略:上下文学习、自我反思、自选择推理和分类器选择推理。结果表明,选择性推理策略,特别是分类器选择推理,能显著恢复损失的性能。据我们所知,这是首个系统揭示推理导致指令遵循失败并提供实用缓解方案的工作。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising and previously overlooked phenomenon: explicit CoT reasoning can significantly degrade instruction-following accuracy. Evaluating 15 models on two benchmarks: IFEval (with simple, rule-verifiable constraints) and ComplexBench (with complex, compositional constraints), we consistently observe performance drops when CoT prompting is applied. Through large-scale case studies and an attention-based analysis, we identify common patterns where reasoning either helps (e.g., with formatting or lexical precision) or hurts (e.g., by neglecting simple constraints or introducing unnecessary content). We propose a metric, constraint attention, to quantify model focus during generation and show that CoT reasoning often diverts attention away from instruction-relevant tokens. To mitigate these effects, we introduce and evaluate four strategies: in-context learning, self-reflection, self-selective reasoning, and classifier-selective reasoning. Our results demonstrate that selective reasoning strategies, particularly classifier-selective reasoning, can substantially recover lost performance. To our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically expose reasoning-induced failures in instruction-following and offer practical mitigation strategies.

大模型指令遵循推理陷阱注意力分析

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