Capturing Symmetry and Antisymmetry in Language Models through Symmetry-Aware Training Objectives

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yuan, Zhangdie, Vlachos, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yuan, Zhangdie
Vlachos, Andreas
author_facet Yuan, Zhangdie
Vlachos, Andreas
contents Capturing symmetric (e.g., country borders another country) and antisymmetric (e.g., parent_of) relations is crucial for a variety of applications. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel Wikidata-derived natural language inference dataset designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that LLMs perform comparably to random chance on this benchmark, highlighting a gap in relational understanding. To address this, we explore encoder retraining via contrastive learning with k-nearest neighbors. The retrained encoder matches the performance of fine-tuned classification heads while offering additional benefits, including greater efficiency in few-shot learning and improved mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_16312
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Capturing Symmetry and Antisymmetry in Language Models through Symmetry-Aware Training Objectives
Yuan, Zhangdie
Vlachos, Andreas
Computation and Language
Capturing symmetric (e.g., country borders another country) and antisymmetric (e.g., parent_of) relations is crucial for a variety of applications. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel Wikidata-derived natural language inference dataset designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that LLMs perform comparably to random chance on this benchmark, highlighting a gap in relational understanding. To address this, we explore encoder retraining via contrastive learning with k-nearest neighbors. The retrained encoder matches the performance of fine-tuned classification heads while offering additional benefits, including greater efficiency in few-shot learning and improved mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.
title Capturing Symmetry and Antisymmetry in Language Models through Symmetry-Aware Training Objectives
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16312