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The Paradox of Learning to Reason from Data (2022) (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jun 27, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A language model was trained on simple logic problems a correct reasoning system could solve perfectly. It scored nearly perfectly on similar test data but failed on new data from the same problems, relying on surface patterns in the wording instead of reasoning, and those cannot all be removed.

Abstract · On the Paradox of Learning to Reason from Data

Logical reasoning is needed in a wide range of NLP tasks. Can a BERT model be trained end-to-end to solve logical reasoning problems presented in natural language? We attempt to answer this question in a confined problem space where there exists a set of parameters that perfectly simulates logical reasoning. We make observations that seem to contradict each other: BERT attains near-perfect accuracy on in-distribution test examples while failing to generalize to other data distributions over the exact same problem space. Our study provides an explanation for this paradox: instead of learning to emulate the correct reasoning function, BERT has in fact learned statistical features that inherently exist in logical reasoning problems. We also show that it is infeasible to jointly remove statistical features from data, illustrating the difficulty of learning to reason in general. Our result naturally extends to other neural models and unveils the fundamental difference between learning to reason and learning to achieve high performance on NLP benchmarks using statistical features.

Honghua Zhang, Liunian Harold Li, Tao Meng, Kai-Wei Chang, Guy Van den Broeck
arXiv:2205.11502 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted May 23, 2022 · updated May 24, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · Table 1 & 2 numbers were out-dated in v1; we have updated them; the observations and conclusions remain unchanged

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Also discussed: Jun 2024 (1 point, 0 comments) · Jul 2023 (2 points, 0 comments) · Aug 2022 (3 points, 0 comments)

The claim is that the models learn the inherent statistical properties of the training set, not the relationships and causality they were intended to learn. When they removed a statistical property of the training set, their BERT model got more accurate.