用错误推理链训练模型,反而比人类标注数据效果更好。
Shape of Thought: When Distribution Matters More than Correctness in Reasoning Tasks
- 用更强大模型生成的错误推理链训练,提升小模型推理能力
- 在MATH、GSM8K等数据集上性能超越人类标注数据
- 模型能从部分正确的推理中学习,正确答案不等于好过程
我们发现,即使合成的思维链(CoT)最终答案全部错误,仅通过这些链训练语言模型,也能提升其推理能力。实验表明,这种方法在数学、算法推理和代码生成等多个任务上优于人类标注数据。我们提出两个解释:一是合成数据分布更接近模型自身分布,利于学习;二是错误链常包含有效推理步骤,模型可从中获益。通过让模型重写人类标注链,使分布更贴近自身,性能提升;同时逐步引入错误链,验证模型对缺陷的容忍度。研究覆盖1.5B至9B参数的Qwen、Llama和Gemma系列模型,使用MATH、GSM8K、Countdown和MBPP数据集。结果表明,数据分布匹配性至关重要,且正确答案并非可靠推理过程指标。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect final answer. Our experiments show this approach can yield better performance on reasoning tasks than training on human-annotated datasets. We hypothesize that two key factors explain this phenomenon: first, the distribution of synthetic data is inherently closer to the language model's own distribution, making it more amenable to learning. Second, these `incorrect' traces are often only partially flawed and contain valid reasoning steps from which the model can learn. To further test the first hypothesis, we use a language model to paraphrase human-annotated traces -- shifting their distribution closer to the model's own distribution -- and show that this improves performance. For the second hypothesis, we introduce increasingly flawed CoT traces and study to what extent models are tolerant to these flaws. We demonstrate our findings across various reasoning domains like math, algorithmic reasoning and code generation using MATH, GSM8K, Countdown and MBPP datasets on various language models ranging from 1.5B to 9B across Qwen, Llama, and Gemma models. Our study shows that curating datasets that are closer to the model's distribution is a critical aspect to consider. We also show that a correct final answer is not always a reliable indicator of a faithful reasoning process.
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