Question Tokens Deserve More Attention: Enhancing Large Language Models without Training through Step-by-Step Reading and Question Attention Recalibration

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with tasks that require a deep understanding of complex questions, especially when faced with long-range dependencies or multi-step reasoning. This work investigates the limitations of current LLMs in question comprehension and identifies three insights: (1) repeating question tokens improves comprehension by increasing attention to question regions, (2) increased backward dependencies negatively affect performance due to unidirectional attentional constraints, and (3) recalibrating attentional mechanisms to prioritize question-relevant regions improves performance. Based on these findings, we first propose a family of prompt-based strategies - Step-by-Step Reading (SSR), SSR+, and SSR++ - that guide LLMs to incrementally process question tokens and align their reasoning with the input structure. These methods significantly improve performance, with SSR++ achieving state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks: 96.66% on GSM8K, 94.61% on ASDiv, and 76.28% on AQuA. Second, we introduce a training-free attention recalibration mechanism that dynamically adjusts attention distributions during inference to emphasize question-relevant regions. This method improves the accuracy of LLaMA 3.1-8B on AQuA by 5.17% without changing model parameters or input prompts. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of structured prompt design and attention optimization in improving LLM comprehension, providing lightweight yet effective tools for improving performance in various NLP tasks.

A Semi-supervised Sensing Rate Learning based CMAB Scheme to Combat COVID-19 by Trustful Data Collection in the Crowd

Mobile CrowdSensing (MCS), through employing considerable workers to sense and collect data in a participatory manner, has been recognized as a promising paradigm for building many large-scale applications in a cost-effective way, such as combating COVID-19. The recruitment of trustworthy and high-quality workers is an important research issue for MCS. Previous studies assume that the qualities of workers are known in advance, or the platform knows the qualities of workers once it receives their collected data. In reality, to reduce their costs and thus maximize revenue, many strategic workers do not perform their sensing tasks honestly and report fake data to the platform. So, it is very hard for the platform to evaluate the authenticity of the received data. In this paper, an incentive mechanism named Semi-supervision based Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit reverse Auction (SCMABA) is proposed to solve the recruitment problem of multiple unknown and strategic workers in MCS. First, we model the worker recruitment as a multi-armed bandit reverse auction problem, and design an UCB-based algorithm to separate the exploration and exploitation, considering the Sensing Rates (SRs) of recruited workers as the gain of the bandit. Next, a Semi-supervised Sensing Rate Learning (SSRL) approach is proposed to quickly and accurately obtain the workers' SRs, which consists of two phases, supervision and self-supervision. Last, SCMABA is designed organically combining the SRs acquisition mechanism with multi-armed bandit reverse auction, where supervised SR learning is used in the exploration, and the self-supervised one is used in the exploitation. We prove that our SCMABA achieves truthfulness and individual rationality. Additionally, we exhibit outstanding performances of the SCMABA mechanism through in-depth simulations of real-world data traces.