Self-Contradictory Reasoning Evaluation and Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Ziyi, Sanyal, Soumya, Lee, Isabelle, Du, Yongkang, Gupta, Rahul, Liu, Yang, Zhao, Jieyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Liu, Ziyi
Sanyal, Soumya
Lee, Isabelle
Du, Yongkang
Gupta, Rahul
Liu, Yang
Zhao, Jieyu
author_facet Liu, Ziyi
Sanyal, Soumya
Lee, Isabelle
Du, Yongkang
Gupta, Rahul
Liu, Yang
Zhao, Jieyu
contents In a plethora of recent work, large language models (LLMs) demonstrated impressive reasoning ability, but many proposed downstream reasoning tasks only focus on final answers. Two fundamental questions persist: 1) how consistent is the reasoning, and 2) can models detect unreliable reasoning? In this paper, we investigate self-contradictory (Self-Contra) reasoning, where the model reasoning does not support its answers. To answer 1), we define and assess the Self-Contra rate across three datasets and delve into finer-grained categories of Self-Contra reasoning. We find that LLMs often contradict themselves in reasoning tasks involving contextual information understanding or commonsense. The model may generate correct answers by taking shortcuts in reasoning or overlooking contextual evidence, leading to compromised reasoning. For 2), we task the state-of-the-art model GPT-4 with identifying Self-Contra reasoning and finer-grained fallacies. We find that finer-grained categories enhanced detection can improve GPT-4's ability to detect Self-Contra. However, it is only able to detect Self-Contra with a 52.2% F1 score, much lower compared to 66.7% for humans. Our results indicate that current LLMs lack the robustness necessary for reliable reasoning and we emphasize the urgent need for establishing best practices in comprehensive reasoning evaluations beyond pure performance-based metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Contradictory Reasoning Evaluation and Detection
Liu, Ziyi
Sanyal, Soumya
Lee, Isabelle
Du, Yongkang
Gupta, Rahul
Liu, Yang
Zhao, Jieyu
Computation and Language
In a plethora of recent work, large language models (LLMs) demonstrated impressive reasoning ability, but many proposed downstream reasoning tasks only focus on final answers. Two fundamental questions persist: 1) how consistent is the reasoning, and 2) can models detect unreliable reasoning? In this paper, we investigate self-contradictory (Self-Contra) reasoning, where the model reasoning does not support its answers. To answer 1), we define and assess the Self-Contra rate across three datasets and delve into finer-grained categories of Self-Contra reasoning. We find that LLMs often contradict themselves in reasoning tasks involving contextual information understanding or commonsense. The model may generate correct answers by taking shortcuts in reasoning or overlooking contextual evidence, leading to compromised reasoning. For 2), we task the state-of-the-art model GPT-4 with identifying Self-Contra reasoning and finer-grained fallacies. We find that finer-grained categories enhanced detection can improve GPT-4's ability to detect Self-Contra. However, it is only able to detect Self-Contra with a 52.2% F1 score, much lower compared to 66.7% for humans. Our results indicate that current LLMs lack the robustness necessary for reliable reasoning and we emphasize the urgent need for establishing best practices in comprehensive reasoning evaluations beyond pure performance-based metrics.
title Self-Contradictory Reasoning Evaluation and Detection
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09603