LLMs Do Not Think Step-by-step In Implicit Reasoning

It has been well-known that Chain-of-Thought can remarkably enhance LLMs' performance on complex tasks. However, because it also introduces slower inference speeds and higher computational costs, many researches have attempted to use implicit CoT, which does not need LLMs to explicitly generate the intermediate steps. But there is still gap between their efficacy and typical explicit CoT methods. This leaves us a doubt that, does implicit CoT really equal to explicit CoT? Therefore, in this study, we address this question through experiments. We probe the information of intermediate steps from the model's hidden states when it is performing implicit CoT. The results surprisingly indicate that LLMs hardly think about intermediate steps, suggesting they may just rely on experience rather than strict step-by-step reasoning. Moreover, we find LLMs' implicit reasoning capabilities are susceptible and unstable, reaffirming the necessity of explicit CoT to effectively support complex tasks.

Patience Is The Key to Large Language Model Reasoning

Recent advancements in the field of large language models, particularly through the Chain of Thought (CoT) approach, have demonstrated significant improvements in solving complex problems. However, existing models either tend to sacrifice detailed reasoning for brevity due to user preferences, or require extensive and expensive training data to learn complicated reasoning ability, limiting their potential in solving complex tasks. To bridge this gap, following the concept of scaling test-time, we propose a simple method by encouraging models to adopt a more patient reasoning style without the need of introducing new knowledge or skills. To employ a preference optimization approach, we generate detailed reasoning processes as positive examples and simple answers as negative examples, thereby training the model to favor thoroughness in its responses. Our results demonstrate a performance increase of up to 6.7% on GSM8k with training just on a lightweight dataset.

An Effective Framework to Help Large Language Models Handle Numeric-involved Long-context Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling long texts and have almost perfect performance in traditional retrieval tasks. However, their performance significantly degrades when it comes to numerical calculations in the long-context. Numeric-involved long-context tasks typically cannot be addressed by current LLMs in normal settings due to their inherent limitations in simultaneously handling complex and massive information. Some CoT like prompting methods can improve accuracy but demands massive output tokens, which is costly and slow. To address this issue, we propose a workflow, which decompose a numeric-involved long-context task into 4 low-level subtasks: judging, extracting and processing with code and conclusion. The former 2 subtasks is relatively simple, which allows us to use smaller models for efficiently processing long context. When numerical calculations are required, we use code generated by LLMs to avoid the disadvantage of LLM not being good at calculations. The results in 2 numeric-involved long-context benchmarks demonstrate our workflow can not only improve accuracy, but also significantly reduce the cost of API calls.

Hyper-multi-step: The Truth Behind Difficult Long-context Tasks

Long-context language models (LCLM), characterized by their extensive context window, is becoming increasingly popular. Meanwhile, many long-context benchmarks present challenging tasks that even the most advanced LCLMs struggle to complete. However, the underlying sources of various challenging long-context tasks have seldom been studied. To bridge this gap, we conduct experiments to indicate their difficulty stems primarily from two basic issues: "multi-matching retrieval," which requires the simultaneous retrieval of multiple items, and "logic-based retrieval," which necessitates logical judgment within retrieval criteria. These two problems, while seemingly straightforward, actually exceed the capabilities of LCLMs because they are proven to be hyper-multi-step (demanding numerous steps to solve) in nature. This finding could explain why LLMs struggle with more advanced long-context tasks, providing a more accurate perspective for rethinking solutions for them.

Mitigate Position Bias in Large Language Models via Scaling a Single Dimension

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in various real-world scenarios due to their excellent generalization capabilities and robust generative abilities. However, they exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the middle", a phenomenon that is especially pronounced in long-context scenarios, which indicates the placement of the key information in different positions of a prompt can significantly affect accuracy. This paper first explores the micro-level manifestations of position bias, concluding that attention weights are a micro-level expression of position bias. It further identifies that, in addition to position embeddings, causal attention mask also contributes to position bias by creating position-specific hidden states. Based on these insights, we propose a method to mitigate position bias by scaling this positional hidden states. Experiments on the NaturalQuestions Multi-document QA, KV retrieval, LongBench and timeline reorder tasks, using various models including RoPE models, context windowextended models, and Alibi models, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach. Our method can improve performance by up to 15.2% by modifying just one dimension of hidden states. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/PositionalHidden.

"Paraphrasing The Original Text" Makes High Accuracy Long-Context QA

Most open-source LLMs still have a context window of no more than 4k, limiting their ability to handle long-context problems. Meanwhile, even those with a long context window still lack satisfactory accuracy. To address this issue, we explore from the perspective of training data and theoretically prove training the capability to handle long contexts requires "effective" rather than "long" data. Based on this, we propose using the "original text paraphrase" task, and successfully extend the context window of the existing model to 32k by a low-cost and effective method, achieving the SOTA accuracy in multi-document-QA among models of the same scale. The model and training data have been open-sourced on HuggingFace(https://huggingface.co/yuyijiong/Qwen-14b-chat-yarn-32k) and WiseModel(https://wisemodel.cn/models/yuyijiong/Qwen-14b-chat-yarn-32k).

FoodGPT: A Large Language Model in Food Testing Domain with Incremental Pre-training and Knowledge Graph Prompt

Currently, the construction of large language models in specific domains is done by fine-tuning on a base model. Some models also incorporate knowledge bases without the need for pre-training. This is because the base model already contains domain-specific knowledge during the pre-training process. We build a large language model for food testing. Unlike the above approach, a significant amount of data in this domain exists in Scanning format for domain standard documents. In addition, there is a large amount of untrained structured knowledge. Therefore, we introduce an incremental pre-training step to inject this knowledge into a large language model. In this paper, we propose a method for handling structured knowledge and scanned documents in incremental pre-training. To overcome the problem of machine hallucination, we constructe a knowledge graph to serve as an external knowledge base for supporting retrieval in the large language model. It is worth mentioning that this paper is a technical report of our pre-release version, and we will report our specific experimental data in future versions.

Intelligent Remote Sensing Image Quality Inspection System

Quality inspection is a necessary task before putting any remote sensing image into practical application. However, traditional manual inspection methods suffer from low efficiency. Hence, we propose a novel two-step intelligent system for remote sensing image quality inspection that combines multiple models, which first performs image classification and then employs the most appropriate methods to localize various forms of quality problems in the image. Results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits excellent performance and efficiency in remote sensing image quality inspection, surpassing the performance of those one-step methods. Furthermore, we conduct an initial exploration of the feasibility and potential of applying multimodal models to remote sensing image quality inspection.