大模型越练越容易胡说,错误会像雪球一样越滚越大。
Reliability Scales Inversely: Hallucinations Snowball Faster in Bigger Language Models
- 发现大模型的幻觉问题随规模增长呈指数级恶化。
- 140亿参数模型的错误率是17亿参数的39倍,风险项占比达49%。
- 错误根源在模型无法感知的隐藏风险,适合研究可信AI的人看。
更大语言模型可靠性更低。在三个模型族、三个基准和六个难度等级下,包括真实聊天记录,模型规模扩大使初始响应知识差距缩小最多达7倍,而响应过程中的知识退化加剧至39倍。我们追溯到一个变量:每个位置的差异δ = log p_M - log p_O(对比更强的参考模型),其二阶矩可精确分解为偏差平方(即KL散度的平方)与解码风险(Var[δ])。这一分解具有解释性:模型自身的不确定性H(p_M)仅影响偏差项,而风险项无模型可读成分。随着规模增加,风险占总误差比例从31%升至49%。在生成中,模型自身不确定性仅需1个词就松弛,但风险持续长达23倍以上,形成高自信却脆弱的错误区间(140亿参数时+69%)。在固定KL条件下降低风险,可减少35%-74%的网络验证过的幻觉。语义熵在该分支上下降约30%(p<10^-16),但制造的幻觉却多出近4倍。大模型的错误呈现主导、自循环、因果且模型自身不可见的雪球效应。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Bigger language models are less reliable. Across three families, three benchmarks and six rungs, including in-the-wild chat logs, scaling closes the start-of-response knowledge gap up to $7\times$ while within-response knowledge degradation grows up to $39\times$. We trace that residual to one variable, the per-position disagreement $δ= \log p_M - \log p_O$ against a stronger oracle, whose second moment splits exactly into bias$^2$ $\mathrm{KL}(p_M \,\|\, p_O)^2$ and decoding risk $\mathrm{Var}[δ]$. That split is an interpretability statement before it is a statistical one: the model's self-readable uncertainty $H(p_M)$ enters only the bias term, so the risk term has no model-readable component. Risk also takes a growing share of the squared error with scale, $31\%$ to $49\%$ from $1.7$B to $14$B. At a fabrication $H(p_M)$ relaxes within one token while risk persists up to $23\times$ longer, leaving a confident-but-precarious regime that bridges consecutive fabrications ($+69\%$ at $14$B). Contracting that risk at fixed $\mathrm{KL}$ removes $35$-$74\%$ of web-verified hallucinations across six rungs and three families. Semantic entropy fires $\approx$$30\%$ less on that branch ($p\!<\!10^{-16}$) though it carries nearly $4\times$ the fabrications. Bigger models snowball mistakes faster, through a failure mode that is dominant, self-perpetuating, causal and invisible to the model itself.
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