On the Role of Model Prior in Real-World Inductive Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Zhuo, Yu, Ding, He, Hangfeng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Liu, Zhuo
Yu, Ding
He, Hangfeng
author_facet Liu, Zhuo
Yu, Ding
He, Hangfeng
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) show impressive inductive reasoning capabilities, enabling them to generate hypotheses that could generalize effectively to new instances when guided by in-context demonstrations. However, in real-world applications, LLMs' hypothesis generation is not solely determined by these demonstrations but is significantly shaped by task-specific model priors. Despite their critical influence, the distinct contributions of model priors versus demonstrations to hypothesis generation have been underexplored. This study bridges this gap by systematically evaluating three inductive reasoning strategies across five real-world tasks with three LLMs. Our empirical findings reveal that, hypothesis generation is primarily driven by the model's inherent priors; removing demonstrations results in minimal loss of hypothesis quality and downstream usage. Further analysis shows the result is consistent across various label formats with different label configurations, and prior is hard to override, even under flipped labeling. These insights advance our understanding of the dynamics of hypothesis generation in LLMs and highlight the potential for better utilizing model priors in real-world inductive reasoning tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_13645
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Role of Model Prior in Real-World Inductive Reasoning
Liu, Zhuo
Yu, Ding
He, Hangfeng
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) show impressive inductive reasoning capabilities, enabling them to generate hypotheses that could generalize effectively to new instances when guided by in-context demonstrations. However, in real-world applications, LLMs' hypothesis generation is not solely determined by these demonstrations but is significantly shaped by task-specific model priors. Despite their critical influence, the distinct contributions of model priors versus demonstrations to hypothesis generation have been underexplored. This study bridges this gap by systematically evaluating three inductive reasoning strategies across five real-world tasks with three LLMs. Our empirical findings reveal that, hypothesis generation is primarily driven by the model's inherent priors; removing demonstrations results in minimal loss of hypothesis quality and downstream usage. Further analysis shows the result is consistent across various label formats with different label configurations, and prior is hard to override, even under flipped labeling. These insights advance our understanding of the dynamics of hypothesis generation in LLMs and highlight the potential for better utilizing model priors in real-world inductive reasoning tasks.
title On the Role of Model Prior in Real-World Inductive Reasoning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13645