大模型被表面信息误导,本质是知识被遮蔽而非缺失。
Would You Walk to the Car Wash? Revealing the Salience Bias of Large Language Models in Commonsense Reasoning

- 用干扰项构建陷阱数据集,暴露模型对显性信息的过度依赖。
- 去除干扰后90%错误可恢复,证明常识知识本就存在。
- 仅靠推理时提示就能显著提升表现,无需重新训练。
随着大语言模型在复杂推理任务中的进步,它们越来越依赖输入中明确提供的条件。然而,在日常常识推理中,这种机制暴露出一个关键弱点——显著性偏差:模型容易被无用的显性干扰项(如数值)误导,忽略任务背后的隐含物理或常识前提。核心问题是:这种失败反映的是常识知识的缺失,还是仅因误导性任务表述导致的知识抑制?为此,我们构建了涵盖四个陷阱维度的SaliTrap基准测试数据集。评估12个顶尖LLM发现,所有主流模型均严重受显著性偏差影响,严重程度随干扰密度增加而上升,且识别陷阱与避免错误常解耦。关键发现是,当剥离任务表述进行重新诱导时,超过90%的顺从性错误可被恢复,表明所需常识本就存在于模型中,但被显著干扰项压制。基于此诊断,我们进一步证明仅通过轻量级推理时提示即可显著缩小差距,无需任何重训练。研究将常识推理失败的瓶颈从模型能力转移到引导方式,我们已公开SaliTrap作为该盲点的测试平台,代码见https://github.com/Wuzheng02/SaliTrap。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in complex reasoning tasks, they have learned to heavily prioritize explicit conditions provided in the input. However, in everyday commonsense reasoning, this mechanism exposes a critical vulnerability which we term Salience Bias: models become easily hijacked by useless explicit distractors (e.g., numerical values), leading them to ignore the implicit physical or commonsense prerequisites of a task. A critical open question is whether this failure reflects a genuine gap in commonsense knowledge or merely its suppression under misleading task framing. To investigate this, we construct the SaliTrap Benchmark, a high-quality dataset across four trap dimensions. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that all mainstream models suffer significantly from salience bias, with severity scaling with distractor density and detecting the trap often decoupled from actually avoiding it. Crucially, by re-eliciting the same models with the task framing stripped away, we show that this is overwhelmingly a failure of \textbf{knowledge suppression rather than knowledge absence}: a context-free knowledge probe alone recovers over 90\% of sycophantic-compliance failures, revealing that the requisite commonsense is intrinsically present but actively crowded out by salient distractors that lure the model into over-compliant, unnecessary computation. Building on this diagnosis, we further show that lightweight, inference-time prompting alone substantially closes the gap without any retraining. Our findings relocate the bottleneck of commonsense reasoning failures from model competence to elicitation, and we release SaliTrap as a testbed for this blind spot. The codes are available at https://github.com/Wuzheng02/SaliTrap.
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