arXiv:2608.22140cs.CLcs.AI2026-08中稿 · EMNLP

词汇扰动会破坏大模型推理,因碎片化导致注意力错位。

Lexical Perturbations Disrupt LLM Reasoning: An Empirical Study of Attention Diversion

  • 通过词汇碎片化分析注意力错位机制
  • 字符扰动使多步推理准确率下降超40%
  • 修复内容或注意力单一策略均无效,需同步恢复

大型语言模型在推理任务中表现强劲,但其对真实世界词汇噪声的鲁棒性仍不明确。我们在键盘错误、字符互换和填充插入三种扰动下,评估了四种开源指令微调模型与前沿模型在四个推理基准上的表现。结果显示,字符级扰动显著降低准确率,尤其在多步推理任务中,降幅超过40%;而填充插入影响较小。我们发现该差异源于注意力分流:词汇扰动破坏子词分词,产生的碎片吸引过量注意力,集中在中间与末尾的Transformer层。长度匹配对照实验表明,碎片化而非提示长度是主因。因子干预显示,内容污染与注意力分配耦合,单独修复任一都无法有效恢复性能;只有两者同步修复才能挽回大部分损失。这解释了链式思考、拼写检查、自修复及更强修复模型等推理时策略为何无法稳定恢复性能——它们仅作用于单一通道。代码与数据已公开于https://github.com/Jiaqian-Janelle/Attention-Diversion。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance, but their robustness to realistic lexical corruption remains poorly understood. We evaluate four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models across four reasoning benchmarks under keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion. Character-level perturbations substantially degrade accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has little effect. We trace this asymmetry to Attention Diversion: lexical corruption fragments subword tokenization, and the resulting fragments attract disproportionate attention mass, concentrated in middle and final transformer layers. Length-matched controls confirm that fragmentation, not prompt length, drives the loss. A factorial intervention then shows why the damage is hard to undo: fragmentation corrupts token content and attention allocation together, and the two are coupled. Restoring clean attention while the content remains corrupted is actively harmful, restoring content alone is insufficient, and only restoring both recovers a substantial share of the gap. This coupling explains why inference-time strategies, including chain-of-thought prompting, spell-checking, self-repair, and stronger repair models, fail to consistently recover performance: each addresses one channel at a time. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Jiaqian-Janelle/Attention-Diversion

大模型注意力机制推理鲁棒性词汇扰动

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