通过信息论框架评估大模型问问题的能力,发现带思维链的模型更高效。
Do Reasoning Models Ask Better Questions? A Formal Information-Theoretic Analysis on Multi-Turn LLM Games
- 构建多轮对话框架,用信息增益衡量提问有效性。
- 有思维链的模型每轮信息增益更高,解题步数更少。
- 小模型靠广撒网弥补能力不足,大模型更敢选最优问题。
大型语言模型在多项任务中表现优异,但在基于代理的场景中仍欠缺有效提问以消除用户请求歧义的能力。现有研究虽探索过通过文字游戏的行为,但缺乏兼顾最终与中间信号的综合评估框架,且很少系统比较使用思维链推理与不使用的模型差异。本文提出一个多轮对话框架,量化评估大模型在层级知识图谱环境中通过是/否问题获取信息的有效性。框架由三个交互式大模型代理构成:提问、回答、更新假设空间。采用信息增益(IG)作为核心指标,基于香农熵计算每轮及累计的提问效果。我们在五级分类体系下的地理猜城市游戏中实例化该框架,评估多种大模型变体在完全与部分可观测条件下的表现,含与不含思维链推理。实验表明,在所测模型中,具备显式推理能力的模型每轮信息增益更高,解题步数更少,尤其在部分可观测场景下优势明显。对推理轨迹的分析显示,小模型通过更激进的问题探索弥补能力限制,大模型则表现出更高的选择自信,生成具有更大潜在信息增益的候选问题。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks but still struggle with a critical ability for LLM-based agents: asking good questions for resolving ambiguity in user requests. While prior work has explored information-seeking behavior through word games, existing benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation frameworks that provide both final and intermediate signals based on Information Gain (IG). Moreover, they rarely provide systematic comparisons between models that use chain-of-thought reasoning and those that do not. We propose a multi-turn dialogue framework that quantitatively measures how effectively LLMs gather information through yes/no questions in a hierarchical knowledge graph environment. Our framework employs a triad of interacting LLM agents that ask questions, answer them, and update the hypothesis space. We adopt IG as the main metric, grounded in Shannon entropy, to assess query effectiveness at each turn and cumulatively. We instantiate our framework in a geographical Guess My City game setting organized in a five-level taxonomy and evaluate multiple LLM variants under fully and partially observable conditions, with and without Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that, among the evaluated models, the ones with explicit reasoning capabilities achieve higher IG per turn and reach solutions in fewer steps, particularly in partially observable settings. Analysis of reasoning traces reveals that smaller models compensate for limited capacity through more aggressive exploration of candidate questions, while larger models exhibit higher assertiveness in selecting optimal queries, generating candidates with greater potential IG.
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