让大模型分析不依赖记忆,看清数据真实贡献。
Epistemic Blinding: An Inference-Time Protocol for Auditing Prior Contamination in LLM-Assisted Analysis
- 分析前用代号替代实体名,对比盲化与未盲化结果
- 生物领域16%的优先靶点被重排,但验证目标保留率不变
- 适合需透明审计的医药、金融等高风险决策场景
本文提出一种推理时协议——认知盲化(epistemic blinding),用于审计大语言模型在药物靶点优先排序中对训练数据的记忆依赖。该系统通过在提示前将实体标识符替换为匿名代码,再与未盲化结果对比,从而量化输出中来自实际数据与模型参数知识的比例。尽管不使推理确定性,但恢复了可审计性关键维度。在四种癌症类型的肿瘤学分析中,盲化导致16%的前20个预测发生变化,但验证靶点召回率保持不变。该污染问题在金融领域同样显著:在标普500股票筛选中,品牌认知偏差影响30%-40%的前20排名。工具已开源并集成至Claude Code技能,支持一键盲化。强调盲化非为提升性能,而是确保分析过程可追踪。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This paper presents epistemic blinding in the context of an agentic system that uses large language models to reason across multiple biological datasets for drug target prioritization. During development, it became apparent that LLM outputs silently blend data-driven inference with memorized priors about named entities - and the blend is invisible: there is no way to determine, from a single output, how much came from the data on the page and how much came from the model's training memory. Epistemic blinding is a simple inference-time protocol that replaces entity identifiers with anonymous codes before prompting, then compares outputs against an unblinded control. The protocol does not make LLM reasoning deterministic, but it restores one critical axis of auditability: measuring how much of an output came from the supplied data versus the model's parametric knowledge. The complete target identification system is described - including LLM-guided evolutionary optimization of scoring functions and blinded agentic reasoning for target rationalization - with demonstration that both stages operate without access to entity identity. In oncology drug target prioritization across four cancer types, blinding changes 16% of top-20 predictions while preserving identical recovery of validated targets. The contamination problem is shown to generalize beyond biology: in S&P 500 equity screening, brand-recognition bias reshapes 30-40% of top-20 rankings across five random seeds. To lower the barrier to adoption, the protocol is released as an open-source tool and as a Claude Code skill that enables one-command epistemic blinding within agentic workflows. The claim is not that blinded analysis produces better results, but that without blinding, there is no way to know to what degree the agent is adhering to the analytical process the researcher designed.
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