Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Jiachun, Cao, Pengfei, Wang, Chenhao, Jin, Zhuoran, Chen, Yubo, Zeng, Daojian, Liu, Kang, Zhao, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Li, Jiachun
Cao, Pengfei
Wang, Chenhao
Jin, Zhuoran
Chen, Yubo
Zeng, Daojian
Liu, Kang
Zhao, Jun
author_facet Li, Jiachun
Cao, Pengfei
Wang, Chenhao
Jin, Zhuoran
Chen, Yubo
Zeng, Daojian
Liu, Kang
Zhao, Jun
contents Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by 23.6%), but also effectively improves the model's overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by 5.5%).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18344
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning
Li, Jiachun
Cao, Pengfei
Wang, Chenhao
Jin, Zhuoran
Chen, Yubo
Zeng, Daojian
Liu, Kang
Zhao, Jun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by 23.6%), but also effectively improves the model's overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by 5.5%).
title Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18344