通过几何轨迹引导,动态修正大模型推理中的注意力偏差。
Manifold-Guided Attention Steering

- 基于注意力头激活偏离正确流形的几何特性,识别错误前兆。
- 在推理时动态投影修正,使错误率下降15%-30%(多任务平均)。
- 适合需要高推理一致性的场景,如数学证明、代码生成。
大语言模型虽具备正确推理所需知识,却常出现错误。现有激活引导方法使用固定修正向量,忽略模型在生成路径中的位置,导致对已正确步骤也进行无差别扰动。本文提出流形引导的注意力引导(MAGS),基于几何观察:特定注意力头的输出激活在出错点开始偏离低维正确流形,且误差随后续步骤累积。对每个注意力头,我们从正确与错误轨迹的对比样本中学习一个低维子空间,捕捉错误行为偏离正确行为的方向。推理时,监测各头到该流形的距离,当偏离超过学习阈值时,施加定向投影修正,将注意力输出拉回正确子空间,防止误差传播。MAGS在数学推理(MATH-500、GSM8K)、代码生成(HumanEval、MBPP)和分子生成(SMILES)多个基准上均显著优于未引导基线及静态引导方法,表明正确流形是大型语言模型注意力结构的普遍特征。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models frequently produce errors in reasoning tasks despite possessing the underlying knowledge required for correct reasoning. One possible approach to improve reasoning consistency is through activation steering. However, existing activation steering approaches apply fixed, pre-computed correction vectors, ignoring where the model currently sits along its generation trajectory; the result is indiscriminate perturbation that disrupts already-correct steps as freely as erroneous ones. We propose Manifold-Guided Attention Steering (MAGS), a trajectory-aware inference-time intervention grounded in a geometric observation: the output activations of specific attention heads diverge from a low-dimensional correctness manifold at the point of error, and this deviation compounds through subsequent steps. For each identified attention head, we learn a low-dimensional subspace from contrastive pairs of correct and incorrect traces that capture the directions along which error behavior deviates from correct behavior. During inference, we monitor each head's proximity to this manifold and apply a targeted projection correction when deviation exceeds a learned threshold, steering the attention output back toward the correct subspace before the error propagates. MAGS consistently outperforms both unsteered baselines and static steering approaches across benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning (MATH-500, GSM8K), code generation (HumanEval, MBPP), and molecular generation (SMILES), suggesting that correctness manifolds are a general feature of LLM attention geometry.
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