LLM在简单集合判断任务中表现脆弱,暴露理解能力缺陷。
On the Brittleness of LLMs: A Journey around Set Membership
- 用基础集合成员查询测试模型,控制变量分析失败模式。
- 不同提示、顺序下准确率波动大,最高仅78%,无规律可循。
- 方法适用于系统评估LLM可靠性,适合研究者与工程师参考。
大型语言模型(LLMs)在复杂推理任务中表现超人,却常在简单问题上失败,引发对其可靠性和可解释性的担忧。本文聚焦于集合成员查询这一最基础的推理形式,如“apple是否属于集合{pear, plum, apple, raspberry}?”,通过简化设计以暴露基本错误模式,并利用规模实验实现可控分析。我们系统评估了提示表述、语义结构、元素顺序和模型选择的影响。大规模分析表明,LLM在该基础任务上的表现始终脆弱且不可预测,所有维度均无稳定表现,暗示其对集合概念的理解是碎片化且混乱的。本研究证明,借助问题的简洁性,大规模实验可全面映射并分析失败模式,为通用的LLM评估提供有效方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) achieve superhuman performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet often fail on much simpler problems, raising concerns about their reliability and interpretability. We investigate this paradox through a focused study with two key design features: simplicity, to expose basic failure modes, and scale, to enable comprehensive controlled experiments. We focus on set membership queries -- among the most fundamental forms of reasoning -- using tasks like ``Is apple an element of the set \{pear, plum, apple, raspberry\}?''. We conduct a systematic empirical evaluation across prompt phrasing, semantic structure, element ordering, and model choice. Our large-scale analysis reveals that LLM performance on this elementary task is consistently brittle, and unpredictable across all dimensions, suggesting that the models' ``understanding'' of the set concept is fragmented and convoluted at best. Our work demonstrates that the large-scale experiments enabled by the simplicity of the problem allow us to map and analyze the failure modes comprehensively, making this approach a valuable methodology for LLM evaluation in general.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。