大模型难以统一不同语言表达的同一概念,导致冗余存储与效率下降。
Language models struggle with compartmentalization
- 模型在多种表达形式间无法共享概念信息,形成独立表征
- 多表达形式越多,模型效率越低,容量被冗余占用
- 早期多语言训练几乎完全隔离,干预效果存在临界点
大型语言模型的训练数据中,同一潜在概念常以多种不同方式呈现:相同事实出现在英语和斯瓦希里语中;许多函数可用Python和Haskell表达;命题可采用形式化与自然语言描述。我们发现,大模型会表现出概念隔离现象,即无法识别并共享不同表达形式间的统计关联。最严重时,模型为每种表达形式建立独立内部表征,导致模型容量被冗余占据,样本效率随表达形式数量增加而下降。我们还发现,尽管合成的平行数据易于学习,却无法改善此问题。在此框架下,小型模型在早期多语言学习阶段几乎完全隔离。所有干预措施均表现出相变行为,其有效性取决于表达形式的数量,表明语言建模目标可能仅不一致地统一表征。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In the training data used by large language models (LLMs), the same latent concept is often presented in multiple distinct ways: the same facts appear in English and Swahili; many functions can be expressed in both Python and Haskell; we can express propositions in both formal and natural language. We show that LLMs can exhibit compartmentalization, where they fail to identify and share statistical strength between distinct presentations of unified concepts. In the worst case, LLMs simply learn parallel internal representations of each presentation of the concept, saturating model capacity with redundancies and decreasing sample efficiency with the number of such presentations. We also demonstrate that synthetic parallel data can fail to improve this despite being easily learned itself. Under this framework, we find that, for small models, early multilingual learning is nearly entirely compartmentalized. Finally, all interventions that we study exhibit a phase transition in which their effectiveness depends on the number of distinct presentations, suggesting that the language modeling objective may only inconsistently unify representations.
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