用概率程序生成训练数据,让大模型学会处理不确定的归纳推理。
Using Probabilistic Programs to Train Inductive Reasoning in Large Language Models

- 用大模型自动生成概率程序模拟真实世界场景
- 在1万组程序化场景上训练后,对未知任务的估计准确率显著提升
- 适合需要判断不确定性的应用,如医疗、金融决策
大语言模型的后训练通常聚焦于可验证正确性的演绎任务(如数学和编程),但现实中的许多问题属于归纳推理:需从稀疏、模糊的观察中推断不确定信念。传统微调方法在此面临挑战,包括难以构建大规模高质量标注数据集,以及目标本身具有分布特性。本文提出一种新方法——基于程序的后验训练(PPT):利用大模型生成多样化的开放世界场景作为概率程序,通过概率推理产生分布式目标响应,并以此软标签进行微调。我们在10,000个程序生成的场景上训练模型,并在保留的模式、人工标注判断和外部基准上评估。结果表明,PPT显著提升了对未见归纳任务的估计准确率,增强了与人类判断的一致性,并在估计与校准任务上实现迁移。此外,原始校准性能的提升无法通过事后温度缩放获得,说明模型真正内化了不确定性,而非仅靠输出调整。这些结果表明,基于概率程序的微调是提升大模型可靠近似归纳推理的有力途径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning typically focuses on deductive tasks such as mathematics and coding where correctness is verifiable. Yet, many real-world reasoning problems are inductive: agents must infer uncertain beliefs from sparse, ambiguous observations. There are challenges to using standard fine-tuning methods for inductive reasoning, including difficulties in curating large-scale, high-quality labeled datasets and in handling targets that are inherently distributional. In this work, we introduce a novel approach, called Program-based Posterior Training (PPT), to address these limitations: we use an LLM to generate diverse open-world scenarios as probabilistic programs, run probabilistic inference to produce distributional target responses to queries, and then fine-tune on these probabilistic soft labels. Using this approach, we fine-tune LLMs on 10,000 programmatically generated scenarios and evaluate on held-out motifs, human-labeled judgments, and external benchmarks. Overall, PPT substantially improves estimation accuracy on held-out inductive tasks, increases alignment with human judgments, and transfers to external benchmarks for estimation and calibration. Additionally, the gains in raw calibration are not subsumed by post-hoc temperature scaling, showing that the models have more deeply internalized uncertainty compared to output rescaling. Together, these results suggest that probabilistic-program-mediated fine-tuning is a promising approach for post-training LLMs to reliably perform approximate inductive inference.
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