差提示会让大模型陷入错误循环,导致性能下降和思维僵化。
Pigeonholing: how bad prompts hurt models, causing collapse and mistakes

- 通过分析用户错误引导和模型自身错误回应,揭示了‘错误固化’现象
- 错误重复使性能下降38%-40%,对话轮次越多,错误越严重
- 适合关注提示工程安全与模型鲁棒性的研究者阅读
尽管上下文学习在大语言模型中通常有效,但不良上下文可能导致性能下降和模式坍缩,我们称之为‘错误固化’。这种问题可能无意中发生:例如用户要求模型为错误的数学定理辩护,或未能纠正模型生成的错误代码。本文在两种场景下研究该现象:(1) 用户提出错误解法;(2) 对话上下文包含模型先前的错误回答。在10个可验证的开放任务中,对10种不同模型的实验表明,错误固化表现为:(1) 重复上下文中的错误答案(性能下降38%-40%);(2) 在编程和文本生成中收敛于少数答案,缺乏多样性;(3) 在争议话题上反转立场以迎合用户或先前回应。错误固化随对话轮次增加而加剧,错误次数从1到5时性能再降14%以上;即使示例正确,也可能引发模式坍缩。为此,我们提出带有合成错误的强化学习方法RLVR,相比基线在不良上下文中提升43%-60%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing." **Unintentionally bad** contexts can happen without malicious jailbreaking intents: For example, a user asks the model to justify an incorrect math theorem or fails to correct the model's buggy code. Specifically, we investigate ``pigeonholing" in two scenarios: (1) when the user suggests a solution, and (2) when the conversation context includes the assistant's previous (incorrect) responses. Our experiments across 10 verifiable and open-ended tasks with 10 different models show that pigeonholing manifests in several ways: (1) repeating the incorrect answers from context (leading to 38-40% performance drop), (2) converging on a narrow set of answers in coding and text generation without exploring alternatives, and (3) flipping stance on controversial topics to align with the user or the assistant's previous claims. We find that pigeonholing worsens almost monotonically with the number of conversation turns (performance drops by additional 14+% as repeated mistakes increase from 1 to 5), and pigeonholing-induced mode collapse can happen even when the provided example is correct. As a step toward mitigation, we propose RLVR with synthetic errors which improves models by 43-60% under bad contexts compared to vanilla RLVR baselines.
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