发现大模型在文本碎片化时性能先降后升,揭示其认知模式切换的隐藏缺陷。
The Text Uncanny Valley: Non-Monotonic Performance Degradation in LLM Information Retrieval

- 通过打乱词边界测试模型信息检索能力
- 准确率随干扰增加呈倒U型曲线,最低点称'文本诡异谷'
- 适合关注真实场景下模型鲁棒性的研究者
现有大模型评测多聚焦语法正确的输入,忽视了对不完美文本的评估。本文研究词边界被破坏对大模型信息检测的影响:通过在词中插入空格将词切碎,发现模型检测准确率随插入率上升呈现倒U型曲线,我们称之为‘文本诡异谷’。为解释该现象,提出模式切换假说:模型在近正常文本时使用词级模式,重度碎片化时转为字符级模式,而谷底是两种模式均失效的混乱过渡期。四项实验与一项分析支持该解释:上下文学习无法挽救谷底表现;正则化扰动显著减弱倒U型;数学推理任务中仅Gemini 3.0 Flash出现该现象,表明依赖精确词汇匹配的任务更易受影响;分词熵峰值出现在F1最低点前,符合模式冲突的推断。这些发现揭示了清洁文本评测无法暴露的失败模式,却直接关联于包含噪声或未清洗输入的实际部署场景。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Existing Large Language Model (LLM) benchmarks primarily focus on syntactically correct inputs, leaving a significant gap in evaluation on imperfect text. In this work, we study how word-boundary corruption affects how LLMs detect targeted information. By inserting whitespace characters within words to break them into fragments, LLMs' detection accuracy follows a U-shaped curve with the increase in insertion rate. We refer to this curve as the Text Uncanny Valley. To explain such observation, we propose a mode transition hypothesis: LLMs operate in a word-level mode for near-normal text and a character-level mode for heavily fragmented text, with the valley marking the disordered transition where neither mode is effective. Four experiments and one analysis are consistent with this account: in-context learning fails to rescue valley-bottom performance; regularizing the perturbation substantially reduces the U-shape; a math reasoning task replicates the U-shape for Gemini 3.0 Flash but not for stronger models, suggesting the effect is attenuated when tasks rely less on exact lexical alignment; and tokenization entropy peaks before the F1 minimum, consistent with a regime-conflict interpretation. These findings reveal a failure mode invisible to clean-text benchmarks yet directly relevant to any deployment scenario involving noisy or uncurated text inputs.
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