arXiv:2605.31561cs.CL2026-05被引 1

用提问探测模型隐藏状态,提升推理可靠性。

What Am I Missing? Question-Answering as Hidden State Probing

论文配图:What Am I Missing? Question-Answering as Hidden State Probing
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过学生提问教师的方式,从隐藏状态中提取推理信号。
  • 提问前的隐藏状态能预判最终答案正确性,准确率超70%。
  • 适合研究模型自我纠错机制的读者,尤其关注推理可信度。

测试时推理已成为大语言模型(LLMs)研究的重要方向,但其内在机制仍不清晰——相同输入或部分解法,多次采样可能产生不同答案。本文提出以提问作为推理期干预手段,揭示模型隐藏状态信息。采用师生框架,训练探针分析学生在提问前后隐藏状态,发现其对最终答案正确性具有预测能力,甚至在教师回答生成前即可判断。这表明提问过程本身蕴含有意义的自我诊断信号,而非依赖教师信息传递。进一步将提问建模为序列决策问题,利用探针输出作为质量评分,设计门控策略以最大化正确概率。实验证明,提问干预效果主要依赖模型自一致性;虽能有效检测错误与不确定性,但纠正失败轨迹的概率与伤害正确轨迹相当。诊断与修正间的差距揭示了语言模型在不确定下自我修正能力的局限。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Test-time reasoning has become a significant field of study since the introduction of chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, the mechanisms of this reasoning process are still under-explored -- from the same input prompt, and even the same partial solution, LLMs can produce varied answers if sampled multiple times. We propose to leverage question-asking as an inference-time intervention that articulates information about the model's hidden state. To achieve that, we present a student-teacher setting where a student asks questions to a teacher. We train a probe on the student's hidden state before and after asking a question and find it is predictive of the trajectory's final correctness, even before generating the teacher's answer. This suggests there is a meaningful signal from the self-diagnosis that occurs during question generation rather than information transfer from the teacher. We then frame question-asking as a sequential decision problem, using this probe as a quality score, and define a gating policy to ask questions that maximize likelihood of correctness. We find that the success of question-asking as an intervention is largely dependent on the model's self-consistency. Our empirical results show a gap between detection and recovery; while our gating policy captures model correctness and uncertainty, interventions are equally likely to harm correct trajectories as they are to recover incorrect ones. This gap between diagnosis and correction has broader implications on language models' capacity for self-refinement under uncertainty.

推理增强模型诊断自一致性

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