arXiv:2601.12075cs.CL2026-01中稿 · EMNLP被引 1

研究语言模型在记忆与引用间的抉择,发现复制比召回更容易诱导。

To Copy or Not to Copy: Copying Is Easier to Induce Than Recall

  • 通过提取仲裁向量分析模型在上下文中的行为选择机制
  • 复制行为可被轻易触发,而恢复记忆需精准干预且更脆弱
  • 适用于理解大模型决策过程及改进检索增强系统

在检索增强设置中,语言模型需在权重存储的参数化知识与提示中的上下文信息之间做出权衡。本文通过一个精心设计的数据集,分离出无关上下文(引发参数化回忆)和相关但错误的上下文(引发复制)。从27种关系中提取残差流中心差异作为仲裁向量,并在不同层和词元位置注入该向量,以实现复制→回忆(抑制上下文使用)和回忆→复制(诱导模型复制任意上下文词元)的转向。在三种架构(仅解码器与编码器/解码器)和两个开放域问答基准上的实验表明,在适度缩放下行为转变稳定,同时保持准确性和流畅性。注意力路由、MLP贡献与逐层概率轨迹的机制分析显示:复制是一种易触发的“再激活”过程,可在输入中多处启动;而恢复回忆则是一种“抑制”过程,更脆弱且强烈依赖于目标词元的干预。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Language models used in retrieval-augmented settings must arbitrate between parametric knowledge stored in their weights and contextual information in the prompt. This work presents a mechanistic study of that choice by extracting an \emph{arbitration vector} from model activations on a curated dataset designed to disentangle (i) irrelevant contexts that elicit parametric recall and (ii) relevant but false contexts that elicit copying. The vector is computed as the residual-stream centroid difference between these regimes across 27 relations, and is injected as an additive intervention at selected layers and token spans to steer behavior in two directions: Copy$\rightarrow$Recall (suppressing context use) and Recall$\rightarrow$Copy (inducing the model to copy any token from the context). Experiments on three architectures (decoder-only and encoder/decoder) and two open-domain QA benchmarks show consistent behavior shifts under moderate scaling while monitoring accuracy and fluency. Mechanistic analyses of attention routing, MLP contributions, and layer-wise probability trajectories reveal an asymmetry: inducing copying is an easy ``reactivation'' process that can be triggered at different locations in the input, while restoring recall is a ``suppression'' process that is more fragile and strongly tied to object-token interventions.

模型机制检索增强行为控制

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