arXiv:2509.21199cs.AI2025-09被引 8

提出大模型单次推理的准确率上限理论,揭示复杂任务会因容量不足导致性能崩溃。

A Fano-Style Accuracy Upper Bound for LLM Single-Pass Reasoning in Multi-Hop QA

  • 基于费诺不等式建立单次推理准确率理论上限
  • 实验验证任务复杂度超容量时准确率急剧下降
  • 设计信息高效框架InfoQA,适合高复杂度多跳问答

多跳问答(MHQA)需在噪声环境下通过序列推理整合分散且相互依赖的证据。由于大模型每次推理输出容量有限,超出后任务相关证据整合变得不可靠,单次推理机制因此存在固有瓶颈。本文通过分析建立类费诺(Fano-style)准确率上界,定义了单次推理大模型的理论性能天花板,揭示当任务复杂度超过模型容量时准确率必然崩溃,为容量感知的表示与结构设计提供通用原则。基于此,我们提出首个多调用框架InfoQA,通过容量感知的任务分解与先前推理路径的主动剪枝,确保每步推理在单次容量限制内,同时通过显式依赖工作流实现对推理路径的精确控制,提升鲁棒性。我们构建了一个严苛且含噪的基准测试集验证理论与框架。实验结果表明模型行为符合预测的容量曲线,而InfoQA实现了稳定性能提升。我们希望本工作能启发更多大模型多步推理方法的发展。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) requires integrating dispersed, interdependent evidence through sequential reasoning under noise. This task is challenging for LLMs as they have a finite per-pass output capacity, beyond which the integration of task-relevant evidence proves unreliable. Consequently, the single-pass reasoning paradigm is inherently vulnerable to this capacity overflow. To formalize this bottleneck, our analysis establishes a Fano-style accuracy upper bound, defining a theoretical performance ceiling for single-pass LLMs. This bound reveals that accuracy inevitably collapses once task complexity exceeds model capacity, providing general principles for capacity-aware representation and structuring of MHQA in LLMs. Building on these principles, we introduce a proof-of-concept multi-call framework for MHQA, InfoQA. It ensures high per-step accuracy by combining capacity-aware task decomposition with active pruning of prior reasoning traces, keeping the information load within the single-pass limit. It further achieves robustness by a dependency-explicit workflow that enables precise control over the reasoning path. We construct a stringent and noise-rich benchmark to validate our theory and framework. Experimental results show that model behavior aligns with our predicted capacity curves while InfoQA achieves consistent performance improvements. We hope our work inspires more LLM multi-step reasoning methods: \faGithub \href{https://github.com/KaiyangWan/InfoQA}{InfoQA}.

多跳问答大模型推理理论上限信息压缩

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