测试大模型识别文档中罕见特征的能力,发现普遍表现不佳。
The Rarity Blind Spot: A Framework for Evaluating Statistical Reasoning in LLMs
- 设计新任务DFM,让模型从10-40篇文档中找出出现少于10%的稀有特征。
- 十款主流大模型在复杂度升高时性能大幅下降,平均准确率不足50%。
- 适合关注模型统计推理能力、决策分析或可解释性研究的人阅读。
有效决策常依赖于识别每个候选的独特特征。现有大模型评估基准多侧重信息检索或摘要生成,未考察模型在一组文档中识别全局稀有特征的能力。本文提出新颖任务Distinctive Feature Mining(DFM),要求模型分析10至40篇文档,挖掘在全局中罕见(如出现频率低于10%)的特征,模拟候选人筛选或产品差异化等真实场景。为系统评估该能力,我们构建DiFBench框架,支持调节文档集大小与独特性阈值。基于此,我们对十款前沿大模型进行大规模测评,结果揭示通用模型与增强推理模型间存在显著差距;所有模型在任务复杂度提升和文档数量增加时性能均明显下降。此外,常见错误是将高频特征误判为独特特征。这些发现揭示了当前大模型在细粒度统计推理与稀有性检测方面的核心缺陷。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Effective decision-making often relies on identifying what makes each candidate distinctive. While existing benchmarks for LLMs emphasize retrieving or summarizing information relevant to a given query, they do not evaluate a model's ability to identify globally distinctive features across a set of documents. We introduce Distinctive Feature Mining (DFM), a new task that challenges models to analyze a small-to-medium collection (10-40 documents) and surface features that are rare in the global context (e.g., appearing in less than 10% of documents). This setting mirrors real-world scenarios such as candidate selection or product differentiation, where statistical reasoning, not retrieval, is key. To enable systematic evaluation of this capability, we present DiFBench, a configurable benchmark creation framework with controllable parameters such as document set size and distinctiveness thresholds. Using DiFBench, we perform a large-scale assessment of distinctive feature mining across ten state-of-the-art LLMs. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between general-purpose and reasoning-enhanced models. All models, however, substantially degrade as the task complexity and document count increase. We also find that a common failure mode is misidentifying frequent features as distinctive. These insights reveal core limitations in contemporary LLMs' abilities to perform fine-grained, statistical reasoning and rarity detection.
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