探究推理模型何时会犯错,如何让它们更清楚自己知道什么、不知道什么。
Reasoning about Uncertainty: Do Reasoning Models Know When They Don't Know?
- 让模型反思自己的推理过程,提升对不确定性的判断能力。
- 多数模型过于自信,错误回答时自信度超85%。
- 部分模型通过自我反思可改善判断,但效果不一致。
推理语言模型在多项挑战性基准上达到顶尖水平,得益于强化学习引导的多步推理。然而,如同以往的语言模型,推理模型仍易生成看似合理却错误的回应(幻觉)。了解模型何时以及多大程度上可信,对其实现安全落地至关重要。为此,本文探索推理模型的不确定性量化问题,提出三个核心问题:第一,推理模型是否校准良好?第二,更深入的推理是否提升校准效果?第三,受人类通过复核思考验证答案与信心的启发,推理模型能否通过显式反思其思维链来改善校准?我们引入内省式不确定性量化(introspective UQ)以探索该方向。在多个主流推理模型及广泛基准上的评估表明:(i)推理模型通常过度自信,错误回答时自述信心常超过85%;(ii)更深层次推理使模型更加过度自信;(iii)部分模型可通过内省改善校准(如o3-Mini和DeepSeek R1),但并非普遍有效(如Claude 3.7 Sonnet反而更差)。最后,我们总结了构建必要不确定性量化基准与改进校准能力的重要研究方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reasoning language models have set state-of-the-art (SOTA) records on many challenging benchmarks, enabled by multi-step reasoning induced using reinforcement learning. However, like previous language models, reasoning models are prone to generating confident, plausible responses that are incorrect (hallucinations). Knowing when and how much to trust these models is critical to the safe deployment of reasoning models in real-world applications. To this end, we explore uncertainty quantification of reasoning models in this work. Specifically, we ask three fundamental questions: First, are reasoning models well-calibrated? Second, does deeper reasoning improve model calibration? Finally, inspired by humans' innate ability to double-check their thought processes to verify the validity of their answers and their confidence, we ask: can reasoning models improve their calibration by explicitly reasoning about their chain-of-thought traces? We introduce introspective uncertainty quantification (UQ) to explore this direction. In extensive evaluations on SOTA reasoning models across a broad range of benchmarks, we find that reasoning models: (i) are typically overconfident, with self-verbalized confidence estimates often greater than 85% particularly for incorrect responses, (ii) become even more overconfident with deeper reasoning, and (iii) can become better calibrated through introspection (e.g., o3-Mini and DeepSeek R1) but not uniformly (e.g., Claude 3.7 Sonnet becomes more poorly calibrated). Lastly, we conclude with important research directions to design necessary UQ benchmarks and improve the calibration of reasoning models.
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