Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Lee, Andrew, Sun, Lihao, Wendler, Chris, Viégas, Fernanda, Wattenberg, Martin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14379
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866908359093911552
author Lee, Andrew
Sun, Lihao
Wendler, Chris
Viégas, Fernanda
Wattenberg, Martin
author_facet Lee, Andrew
Sun, Lihao
Wendler, Chris
Viégas, Fernanda
Wattenberg, Martin
contents How do reasoning models verify their own answers? We study this question by training a model using DeepSeek R1's recipe on the CountDown task. We leverage the fact that preference tuning leads to mode collapse, yielding a model that always produces highly structured chain-of-thought sequences. With this setup, we do top-down and bottom-up analyses to reverse-engineer how the model verifies its outputs. Top-down, we find Gated Linear Unit (GLU) weights encoding verification-related tokens, such as ``success'' or ``incorrect''. Bottom-up, we find that ``previous-token heads'' are mainly responsible for self-verification in our setup. Our analyses meet in the middle: drawing inspiration from inter-layer communication channels, we use the identified GLU weights to localize as few as three attention heads that can disable self-verification, pointing to a necessary component of a potentially larger verification circuit. Finally, we verify that similar verification components exist in our base model and a general reasoning DeepSeek-R1 model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_14379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Geometry of Self-Verification in a Task-Specific Reasoning Model
Lee, Andrew
Sun, Lihao
Wendler, Chris
Viégas, Fernanda
Wattenberg, Martin
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
How do reasoning models verify their own answers? We study this question by training a model using DeepSeek R1's recipe on the CountDown task. We leverage the fact that preference tuning leads to mode collapse, yielding a model that always produces highly structured chain-of-thought sequences. With this setup, we do top-down and bottom-up analyses to reverse-engineer how the model verifies its outputs. Top-down, we find Gated Linear Unit (GLU) weights encoding verification-related tokens, such as ``success'' or ``incorrect''. Bottom-up, we find that ``previous-token heads'' are mainly responsible for self-verification in our setup. Our analyses meet in the middle: drawing inspiration from inter-layer communication channels, we use the identified GLU weights to localize as few as three attention heads that can disable self-verification, pointing to a necessary component of a potentially larger verification circuit. Finally, we verify that similar verification components exist in our base model and a general reasoning DeepSeek-R1 model.
title The Geometry of Self-Verification in a Task-Specific Reasoning Model
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14379