提出可实时监测大模型生成疲劳的量化指标,解决长文本生成失效问题。
Cognitive Fatigue in Autoregressive Transformers: Formalization and Measurement

- 定义生成过程中的认知疲劳,整合注意力衰退、表征漂移和熵失准三信号。
- 提出的疲劳指数(FI)在9个模型上预测任务退化准确率达AUROC=0.95。
- 适用于生产环境监控,尤其对小规模指令微调模型有预警价值。
自回归语言模型在长序列生成中常出现重复、指令偏离和熵不稳定等问题,但缺乏实时诊断工具。本文将此现象形式化为认知疲劳,一种生成过程中可测量的状态,特征包括对原始提示的关注度下降、表征漂移和熵校准失准。提出轻量级、模型无关的疲劳指数(FI),基于单调性、有界性和可解释性等公理聚合三类信号,实现可靠的运行时监控。在九种模型(1B–13B参数)上,FI轨迹呈现结构性时间动态,能有效预测任务退化(AUROC=0.95)与重复现象(Spearman rho=0.94)。研究发现非单调缩放规律:3B以下的指令微调模型比基础模型更快崩溃,7B以上趋势反转。压力测试表明,长上下文、中间证据位置及低精度会加速FI启动。结果确立认知疲劳为可度量现象,定位FI为生产级大模型可靠性监控的可靠工具。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autoregressive language models frequently degrade during long-horizon generation, producing repetitive text, losing instruction adherence, and exhibiting unstable entropy. Despite the prevalence of these failures, practitioners lack online diagnostics to detect them in real-time as they occur. We formalize this degradation as cognitive fatigue, a measurable generation-time state characterized by decay in attention to the original prompt, representational drift, and entropy miscalibration. We introduce the Fatigue Index (FI), a lightweight, model-agnostic diagnostic that aggregates these three signals under explicit axioms (monotonicity, boundedness, interpretability) enabling reliable runtime monitoring. Across nine models (1B-13B parameters), FI trajectories exhibit structured temporal dynamics, predict task degradation (AUROC = 0.95) and repetition (Spearman rho = 0.94), and reveal non-monotonic scaling behavior: instruction-tuned models below 3B exhibit faster collapse than base models, with this trend reversing at 7B. Stress analyses further show that FI onset accelerates under longer contexts, middle-positioned evidence, and reduced numerical precision. These results establish cognitive fatigue as a coherent and measurable phenomenon, and position FI as a principled tool for runtime reliability monitoring in production LLM systems.
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