Benchmarking and Understanding Compositional Relational Reasoning of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ni, Ruikang, Xiao, Da, Meng, Qingye, Li, Xiangyu, Zheng, Shihui, Liang, Hongliang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ni, Ruikang
Xiao, Da
Meng, Qingye
Li, Xiangyu
Zheng, Shihui
Liang, Hongliang
author_facet Ni, Ruikang
Xiao, Da
Meng, Qingye
Li, Xiangyu
Zheng, Shihui
Liang, Hongliang
contents Compositional relational reasoning (CRR) is a hallmark of human intelligence, but we lack a clear understanding of whether and how existing transformer large language models (LLMs) can solve CRR tasks. To enable systematic exploration of the CRR capability of LLMs, we first propose a new synthetic benchmark called Generalized Associative Recall (GAR) by integrating and generalizing the essence of several tasks in mechanistic interpretability (MI) study in a unified framework. Evaluation shows that GAR is challenging enough for existing LLMs, revealing their fundamental deficiency in CRR. Meanwhile, it is easy enough for systematic MI study. Then, to understand how LLMs solve GAR tasks, we use attribution patching to discover the core circuits reused by Vicuna-33B across different tasks and a set of vital attention heads. Intervention experiments show that the correct functioning of these heads significantly impacts task performance. Especially, we identify two classes of heads whose activations represent the abstract notion of true and false in GAR tasks respectively. They play a fundamental role in CRR across various models and tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Caiyun-AI/GAR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12841
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking and Understanding Compositional Relational Reasoning of LLMs
Ni, Ruikang
Xiao, Da
Meng, Qingye
Li, Xiangyu
Zheng, Shihui
Liang, Hongliang
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Compositional relational reasoning (CRR) is a hallmark of human intelligence, but we lack a clear understanding of whether and how existing transformer large language models (LLMs) can solve CRR tasks. To enable systematic exploration of the CRR capability of LLMs, we first propose a new synthetic benchmark called Generalized Associative Recall (GAR) by integrating and generalizing the essence of several tasks in mechanistic interpretability (MI) study in a unified framework. Evaluation shows that GAR is challenging enough for existing LLMs, revealing their fundamental deficiency in CRR. Meanwhile, it is easy enough for systematic MI study. Then, to understand how LLMs solve GAR tasks, we use attribution patching to discover the core circuits reused by Vicuna-33B across different tasks and a set of vital attention heads. Intervention experiments show that the correct functioning of these heads significantly impacts task performance. Especially, we identify two classes of heads whose activations represent the abstract notion of true and false in GAR tasks respectively. They play a fundamental role in CRR across various models and tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Caiyun-AI/GAR.
title Benchmarking and Understanding Compositional Relational Reasoning of LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12841