小模型也能自我觉察,通过训练可显著提升其自省能力。
Introspection Fine-Tuning (IFT): Training Small LLMs to Introspect

- 用句子定位和强度比较新方法,避开原有评估的误导性偏差。
- 20亿参数模型自省能力远超随机水平,10亿参数模型经训练后准确率提升6倍。
- 引入自省微调(IFT)可有效激发模型自我监控潜力,且不影响原有能力。
小语言模型能否检测并报告自身内部激活的变化?我们通过激活引导来研究这一问题:向模型残差流注入概念向量,并观察模型是否能准确报告扰动。先前采用的二元检测范式(要求模型回答‘是’或‘否’)在小模型中存在偏差,因引导本身会诱使模型倾向于肯定回答。为此我们提出两种无偏评估方式:句子定位(从N个句子中识别被扰动者,随机正确率=1/N)与强度比较(判断两句话中哪句扰动更强,随机正确率=50%)。在两个系列共六种模型(Llama-3.2与Gemma-4)上测试发现,20亿参数模型的自省能力明显优于随机水平,且能力随规模增长;而10亿参数模型表现接近随机。我们提出自省微调(IFT),在模型自身前向传播产生的扰动样本上进行监督微调。经IFT,Llama-1B的句子定位准确率从9.6%提升至60.6%(提升6倍),零样本泛化到强度比较任务时准确率也从30.2%升至52.2%。30亿与80亿参数模型亦获益,且标准能力基准测试无明显退化。结果表明,自省能力并非仅由规模决定,可通过训练直接增强,揭示了模型潜在的自我监控能力,对人工智能透明性与对齐具有重要意义。代码已公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Can small language models detect and report on perturbations their own internal activations? We investigate this question through the lens of activation steering: injecting concept vectors into a model's residual stream and measuring whether the model can accurately report on the perturbation. We first show that the binary detection paradigm used in prior work -- prompting the model to answer Yes'' or No'' to whether it detects an injected thought -- is confounded in small models, as steering biases the model toward affirmative responses regardless of the question content. We therefore propose two confound-free evaluation paradigms: sentence localization (identifying which of $N$ sentences was perturbed, chance $= 1/N$) and strength comparison (identifying which of two sentences received a stronger injection, chance $= 50\%$). Evaluating across six models from two families (Llama-3.2 and Gemma-4), we find that models as small as 2B parameters introspect reliably well above chance, and that introspective ability generally increases with scale. Llama-1B, however, performs at or below chance. We then introduce \emph{Introspection Fine-Tuning} (IFT): supervised fine-tuning on sentence-localization examples constructed from the model's own perturbed forward passes. IFT raises Llama-1B sentence-localization accuracy from $9.6\%$ to $60.6\%$ (a $6\times$ improvement), with gains generalizing zero-shot to the held-out strength-comparison task ($30.2\% \to 52.2\%$). IFT also improves introspection for 3B and 8B models, while inducing negligible degradation on standard capability benchmarks. Our results suggest that introspective ability is not fixed by scale alone: it can be directly trained, and doing so unlocks latent self-monitoring capacity with implications for AI transparency and alignment. Our code is \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/IFT-introspection-2092/README.md}{here}.
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