Seemingly Plausible Distractors in Multi-Hop Reasoning: Are Large Language Models Attentive Readers?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bhuiya, Neeladri, Schlegel, Viktor, Winkler, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Bhuiya, Neeladri
Schlegel, Viktor
Winkler, Stefan
author_facet Bhuiya, Neeladri
Schlegel, Viktor
Winkler, Stefan
contents State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) are accredited with an increasing number of different capabilities, ranging from reading comprehension, over advanced mathematical and reasoning skills to possessing scientific knowledge. In this paper we focus on their multi-hop reasoning capability: the ability to identify and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Given the concerns with the presence of simplifying cues in existing multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, which allow models to circumvent the reasoning requirement, we set out to investigate, whether LLMs are prone to exploiting such simplifying cues. We find evidence that they indeed circumvent the requirement to perform multi-hop reasoning, but they do so in more subtle ways than what was reported about their fine-tuned pre-trained language model (PLM) predecessors. Motivated by this finding, we propose a challenging multi-hop reasoning benchmark, by generating seemingly plausible multi-hop reasoning chains, which ultimately lead to incorrect answers. We evaluate multiple open and proprietary state-of-the-art LLMs, and find that their performance to perform multi-hop reasoning is affected, as indicated by up to 45% relative decrease in F1 score when presented with such seemingly plausible alternatives. We conduct a deeper analysis and find evidence that while LLMs tend to ignore misleading lexical cues, misleading reasoning paths indeed present a significant challenge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_05197
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Seemingly Plausible Distractors in Multi-Hop Reasoning: Are Large Language Models Attentive Readers?
Bhuiya, Neeladri
Schlegel, Viktor
Winkler, Stefan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) are accredited with an increasing number of different capabilities, ranging from reading comprehension, over advanced mathematical and reasoning skills to possessing scientific knowledge. In this paper we focus on their multi-hop reasoning capability: the ability to identify and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Given the concerns with the presence of simplifying cues in existing multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, which allow models to circumvent the reasoning requirement, we set out to investigate, whether LLMs are prone to exploiting such simplifying cues. We find evidence that they indeed circumvent the requirement to perform multi-hop reasoning, but they do so in more subtle ways than what was reported about their fine-tuned pre-trained language model (PLM) predecessors. Motivated by this finding, we propose a challenging multi-hop reasoning benchmark, by generating seemingly plausible multi-hop reasoning chains, which ultimately lead to incorrect answers. We evaluate multiple open and proprietary state-of-the-art LLMs, and find that their performance to perform multi-hop reasoning is affected, as indicated by up to 45% relative decrease in F1 score when presented with such seemingly plausible alternatives. We conduct a deeper analysis and find evidence that while LLMs tend to ignore misleading lexical cues, misleading reasoning paths indeed present a significant challenge.
title Seemingly Plausible Distractors in Multi-Hop Reasoning: Are Large Language Models Attentive Readers?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05197