Deceptive Semantic Shortcuts on Reasoning Chains: How Far Can Models Go without Hallucination?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Bangzheng, Zhou, Ben, Wang, Fei, Fu, Xingyu, Roth, Dan, Chen, Muhao
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Li, Bangzheng
Zhou, Ben
Wang, Fei
Fu, Xingyu
Roth, Dan
Chen, Muhao
author_facet Li, Bangzheng
Zhou, Ben
Wang, Fei
Fu, Xingyu
Roth, Dan
Chen, Muhao
contents Despite the recent advancement in large language models (LLMs) and their high performances across numerous benchmarks, recent research has unveiled that LLMs suffer from hallucinations and unfaithful reasoning. This work studies a specific type of hallucination induced by semantic associations. Specifically, we investigate to what extent LLMs take shortcuts from certain keyword/entity biases in the prompt instead of following the correct reasoning path. To quantify this phenomenon, we propose a novel probing method and benchmark called EureQA. We start from questions that LLMs will answer correctly with utmost certainty, and mask the important entity with evidence sentence recursively, asking models to find masked entities according to a chain of evidence before answering the question. During the construction of the evidence, we purposefully replace semantic clues (entities) that may lead to the correct answer with distractor clues (evidence) that will not directly lead to the correct answer but require a chain-like reasoning process. We evaluate if models can follow the correct reasoning chain instead of short-cutting through distractor clues. We find that existing LLMs lack the necessary capabilities to follow correct reasoning paths and resist the attempt of greedy shortcuts. We show that the distractor semantic associations often lead to model hallucination, which is strong evidence that questions the validity of current LLM reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09702
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deceptive Semantic Shortcuts on Reasoning Chains: How Far Can Models Go without Hallucination?
Li, Bangzheng
Zhou, Ben
Wang, Fei
Fu, Xingyu
Roth, Dan
Chen, Muhao
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Despite the recent advancement in large language models (LLMs) and their high performances across numerous benchmarks, recent research has unveiled that LLMs suffer from hallucinations and unfaithful reasoning. This work studies a specific type of hallucination induced by semantic associations. Specifically, we investigate to what extent LLMs take shortcuts from certain keyword/entity biases in the prompt instead of following the correct reasoning path. To quantify this phenomenon, we propose a novel probing method and benchmark called EureQA. We start from questions that LLMs will answer correctly with utmost certainty, and mask the important entity with evidence sentence recursively, asking models to find masked entities according to a chain of evidence before answering the question. During the construction of the evidence, we purposefully replace semantic clues (entities) that may lead to the correct answer with distractor clues (evidence) that will not directly lead to the correct answer but require a chain-like reasoning process. We evaluate if models can follow the correct reasoning chain instead of short-cutting through distractor clues. We find that existing LLMs lack the necessary capabilities to follow correct reasoning paths and resist the attempt of greedy shortcuts. We show that the distractor semantic associations often lead to model hallucination, which is strong evidence that questions the validity of current LLM reasoning.
title Deceptive Semantic Shortcuts on Reasoning Chains: How Far Can Models Go without Hallucination?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09702