发现大模型在相似任务间缺乏敏感性,提出轻量级方法提升任务响应能力。
Diagnosing Task Insensitivity in Language Agents

- 通过扰动任务指令,揭示模型对任务描述不敏感的倾向。
- 训练中注意力持续远离任务词,偏向局部观察,存在捷径优化偏差。
- 提出任务扰动NLL正则化,显著提升模型对任务变化的响应能力。
大语言模型虽能作为长时序智能体,但其分布外(OOD)泛化能力仍弱。我们识别出关键问题:任务不敏感——面对语义相似但任务不同的情况,模型会沿用训练中习得的模式,无法正确应对新任务。实验表明,即使指令语义被破坏,模型仍继续执行原任务动作;当将训练提示中的任务描述替换为另一相近但不同的任务时,模型仍输出相同动作。这一行为伴随训练期间注意力从任务词向局部观测持续漂移,暗示存在捷径优化偏差。为此,我们提出任务扰动负对数似然(Task-Perturbed NLL)优化,一种轻量级对比正则化方法,显式鼓励动作依赖于任务指令。大量评估显示,该方法提升了任务敏感性和分布外泛化能力,同时保持更稳定的任务词注意力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models can serve as capable long-horizon agents, but their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization remains weak. We identify a key source of this failure as task insensitivity: when faced with similar but distinct tasks, models might apply patterns learned during training and fail to solve the task at hand. We show that models often continue with actions aligned with the original task even when the instruction is semantically corrupted and cannot be directly answered. We further find that, when we replace the task description in a trained prompt with another similar but distinct task, the model may still output the same action. This behavior is accompanied by a consistent training-time attention drift away from task tokens and toward local observations, suggesting an optimization bias toward shortcuts. To mitigate this problem, we propose Task-Perturbed NLL Optimization, a lightweight contrastive regularizer that explicitly encourages action dependence on the task instruction. Extensive evaluations show that our intervention improves task sensitivity and OOD generalization while preserving more stable attention to task tokens.
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