arXiv:2605.14636cs.AI2026-05

教大模型在时间截断前判断自己该不知道什么,避免用未来信息推理。

Teaching Large Language Models When Not to Know: Learning Temporal Critique for Ex-Ante Reasoning

论文配图:Teaching Large Language Models When Not to Know: Learning Temporal Critique for Ex-Ante Reasoning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 设计时间批判微调框架,让模型学会识别回答中是否混入了截断后知识。
  • 实验显示可降低41.89%的时序泄漏率,优于提示工程和监督微调。
  • 适合需要严格时间边界推理的任务,如历史分析、预测评估等场景。

大型语言模型在时间截断情境下常出现推理失败:当被要求从早期时间点作答时,仍会使用后期才出现的知识。本文从‘事前推理’(ex-ante reasoning)视角研究此问题,发现时序泄露高度依赖提示设计:明确的时间截断声明优于隐含的历史表述,前置约束比后置约束更有效减少泄露。这表明提示能引导模型进入特定时间框架,但无法赋予其验证回答是否符合时间限制的能力。进一步论证监督微调(SFT)不足,因事前正确性并非答案本身属性,而是与截断点的关系。为此提出TCFT框架,训练模型在给定查询、截断点和候选回答时,识别截断后信息泄露、解释时间边界违规并判断时间合规性。在Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct和Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct上实验表明,TCFT显著优于提示与SFT基线,平均泄露率分别降低41.89和37.79个百分点。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to reason under temporal cutoffs: when prompted to answer from the standpoint of an earlier time, they exploit knowledge that became available only later. We study this failure through the lens of ex-ante reasoning, where a model must rely exclusively on information knowable before a cutoff. Through a systematic analysis of prompt-level interventions, we find that temporal leakage is highly sensitive to cutoff formulation and instruction placement: explicit cutoff statements outperform implicit historical framings, and prefix constraints reduce leakage more effectively than suffix constraints. These findings indicate that prompting can steer models into a temporal frame, but does not endow them with the ability to verify whether a response is temporally admissible. We further argue that supervised fine-tuning is insufficient, since ex-ante correctness is not an intrinsic property of an answer, but a relation between the answer and the cutoff. To address this gap, we propose TCFT, a Temporal Critique Fine-Tuning framework that trains models to acquire cutoff-aware temporal verification. Given a query, a cutoff, and a candidate response, TCFT teaches the model to identify post-cutoff leakage, explain temporal boundary violations, and judge temporal admissibility. Experiments with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct show that TCFT consistently outperforms prompting and SFT baselines, reducing average leakage by 41.89 and 37.79 percentage points, respectively.

时序推理大模型提示工程批判机制

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