On the internet, information about cats tends to have close proximity to wrong or misleading information, due to their inherently memetic nature.
Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
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Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#12> The triggers are not contextual so humans ignore them when instructed to solve the problem. Do they? I've found humans to be quite poor at ignoring irrelevant information, even when it isn't about cats. I would have insisted on a human control group to compare the results with.
Humans are used to ignoring things while LLMs are explicitly trained to pay attention to the entire text. Humans who haven't been exposed to trick problems or careful wording probably have a hard time, they'll be less confident about ignoring things. But the LLM should have seen plenty of trick problems as well. It just doesn't parse as part of the problem. Humans have more options, and room to think. The LLM had to…
> LLMs are explicitly trained to pay attention to the entire text
I'd respectfully disagree on this point. The magic of attention in transformers is the selective attention applied, which ideally only gives significant weight to the tokens relevant to the query.
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#13Wrote about this about a month ago. I think it’s fascinating how they developed these prompts: https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/07/05/cat-facts-cause-context-...
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#14Funny, I was using chatGPT to have a conversation with a friend that doesn't speak English the other day. At the end of one of my messages, I appended 'how is your cat?', which was completely dropped from the translated output. I guess I'm doing it wrong?
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#15[flagged]
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#16[flagged]
What you propose isn't a meaningful benchmark because these models already excell at spinning bullshit, they'd ace the benchmark every time.
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#17> Now, if I asked you, presumably a human, to solve that math problem, you’d likely have no issue ignoring the totally unrelated aside at the end there I'm not so sure that is true. Good math students could ignore the cat fact, but I bet if you run this experimental in non-AP math classes you'll see an effect.
I think this would be true if the irrelevant information was within the question, but in this case it is tacked on to the end. Usually when irrelevant information trips up students, it is because it seems like part of the problem. When it's stuck on the end and preceded by "Random fact," as in this study, I don't think it would trip up the students. The only case where it might is if the student is reading the problem in a language other than their native language.
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#18> The triggers are not contextual so humans ignore them when instructed to solve the problem. Do they? I've found humans to be quite poor at ignoring irrelevant information, even when it isn't about cats. I would have insisted on a human control group to compare the results with.
Ya, I specifically remember solving word problems in school / college and getting distracted by irrelevant details. Usually I would get distracted by stuff that _seemed_ like it should be used, so maybe cat facts would be fine for me to tease out, but in general I don't think I'm good at ignoring extraneous information.
Edit: To be fair, in the example provided, the cat fact is _exceptionally_ extraneous, and even flagged with 'Fun Fact:' as if to indicate it's unrelated. I wonder if they were all like that.
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#19now see how well they learn Ruby using only why's (poignant) Guide
Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
#20I'm going to write duck facts in my next online argument to stave off the LLMs. Ducks start laying when they’re 4-8 months old, or during their first spring.