The Reasoning-Memorization Interplay in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but struggle to generalize to unseen questions due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify a set of linear features in the model’s residual stream that govern the balance between genuine reasoning and memory recall. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be manipulated to activate the most relevant problem-solving capabilities during answer generation. |
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Mingyu Jin, Weidi Luo, Sitao Cheng, Xinyi Wang, Wenyue Hua, Ruixiang Tang, William Yang Wang, Yongfeng Zhang
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have underscored their exceptional reasoning prowess with natural language understanding across a broad spectrum of tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in many intellectual activities. |
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| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on English monolingual models, but how these mechanisms generalize to non-English languages remains unexplored. |
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