Parrot Mind: Towards Explaining the Complex Task Reasoning of Pretrained Large Language Models with Template-Content Structure

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Yang, Haotong, Meng, Fanxu, Lin, Zhouchen, Zhang, Muhan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909161551298560
author Yang, Haotong
Meng, Fanxu
Lin, Zhouchen
Zhang, Muhan
author_facet Yang, Haotong
Meng, Fanxu
Lin, Zhouchen
Zhang, Muhan
contents The pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have shown their extraordinary capacity to solve reasoning tasks, even on tasks that require a complex process involving multiple sub-steps. However, given the vast possible generation space of all the tasks, how the pretrained model learns the reasoning ability remains an open question. We firstly propose that an intrinsic structural constraint on the generated sequence of language-based reasoning -- we called it template-content structure (T-C structure) -- is the key to explain why LLMs can solve a large number of complex reasoning problems with limited training data by showing this structure can reduce the possible space from exponential level to linear level. Furthermore, by generalizing this structure to the hierarchical case, we demonstrate that models can achieve task composition, further reducing the space needed to learn from linear to logarithmic, thereby effectively learning on complex reasoning involving multiple steps. We provide both examples and formal theory of our T-C structure. We also experimentally validate the existence of the T-C structure in some current LLMs and its effectiveness for reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_05452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Parrot Mind: Towards Explaining the Complex Task Reasoning of Pretrained Large Language Models with Template-Content Structure
Yang, Haotong
Meng, Fanxu
Lin, Zhouchen
Zhang, Muhan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
The pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have shown their extraordinary capacity to solve reasoning tasks, even on tasks that require a complex process involving multiple sub-steps. However, given the vast possible generation space of all the tasks, how the pretrained model learns the reasoning ability remains an open question. We firstly propose that an intrinsic structural constraint on the generated sequence of language-based reasoning -- we called it template-content structure (T-C structure) -- is the key to explain why LLMs can solve a large number of complex reasoning problems with limited training data by showing this structure can reduce the possible space from exponential level to linear level. Furthermore, by generalizing this structure to the hierarchical case, we demonstrate that models can achieve task composition, further reducing the space needed to learn from linear to logarithmic, thereby effectively learning on complex reasoning involving multiple steps. We provide both examples and formal theory of our T-C structure. We also experimentally validate the existence of the T-C structure in some current LLMs and its effectiveness for reasoning.
title Parrot Mind: Towards Explaining the Complex Task Reasoning of Pretrained Large Language Models with Template-Content Structure
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05452