arXiv:2602.20122cs.CLcs.AI2026-02被引 1

通过开放数据集解析大模型的知识来源,揭示其记忆与外部信息的协同机制。

NanoKnow: How to Know What Your Language Model Knows

  • 构建基于纳米对话数据的问答拆分基准,追踪知识来源。
  • 发现模型准确率高度依赖训练数据中答案出现频率。
  • 外部证据可缓解频率偏差,但训练记忆仍具优势。

大型语言模型如何知道它们所知的内容?这一问题长期受限于预训练数据的不可见性。最近发布的nanochat——一组具备完全开放预训练数据的小型LLM——为该问题提供了透明视角。为此,我们推出NanoKnow基准数据集,将Natural Questions和SQuAD中的问题按答案是否存在于nanochat的预训练语料中进行划分。利用这些划分,我们能有效分离模型输出时依赖的知识来源。在八个nanochat检查点上进行实验发现:(1)闭卷准确率受训练数据中答案频率显著影响;(2)提供外部证据可缓解此频率依赖;(3)即使有外部证据,若答案曾出现在训练数据中,模型仍更准确,表明参数化知识与外部知识具有互补性;(4)无关信息有害,准确率随非相关上下文的数量和位置而下降。所有NanoKnow资源已开源至https://github.com/castorini/NanoKnow。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

How do large language models (LLMs) know what they know? Answering this question has been difficult because pre-training data is often a "black box" - unknown or inaccessible. The recent release of nanochat - a family of small LLMs with fully open pre-training data - addresses this as it provides a transparent view into where a model's parametric knowledge comes from. Towards the goal of understanding how knowledge is encoded by LLMs, we release NanoKnow, a benchmark dataset that partitions questions from Natural Questions and SQuAD into splits based on whether their answers are present in nanochat's pre-training corpus. Using these splits, we can now properly disentangle the sources of knowledge that LLMs rely on when producing an output. To demonstrate NanoKnow's utility, we conduct experiments using eight nanochat checkpoints. Our findings show: (1) closed-book accuracy is strongly influenced by answer frequency in the pre-training data, (2) providing external evidence can mitigate this frequency dependence, (3) even with external evidence, models are more accurate when answers were seen during pre-training, demonstrating that parametric and external knowledge are complementary, and (4) non-relevant information is harmful, with accuracy decreasing based on both the position and the number of non-relevant contexts. We release all NanoKnow artifacts at https://github.com/castorini/NanoKnow.

知识溯源语言模型可解释性数据透明

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