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Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

science.org

101–110 of 270 posts

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#101
post #3

> 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.

I doubt that the performance of those human subjects who can solve those problems when no distractors are included will be worsened by 300% when the distractors are included.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#102
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.

If asked verbally that would absolutely confuse some humans. Easily enough to triple the error rate for that specific question (granted, that's easier than the actual questions, but still). Even in a written test with time pressure it would probably still have a statistically significant effect

Is the model thinking what is cat doing here? Then start thinking it is being tested?

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#103
post #34
post #3

> 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.

Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.

It absolutely would if you start hitting working memory constraints. And at the margins some people who would be 50:50 on a given math problem will have working memory constraints.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#104
post #80

There is more than one comment here asserting that the authors should have done a parallel comparison study against humans on the same question bank as if the study authors had set out to investigate whether humans or LLMs reason better in this situation. The authors do include the claim that humans would immediately disregard this information and maybe some would and some wouldn't that could be debated and seemingly…

I generally will respond to stuff like this with "people do this, too", but this result given their specific examples is genuinely surprising to me, and doesn't match at all my experience with using LLMs in practice, where it does frequently ignore irrelevant data in providing a helpful response. I do think that people think far too much about 'happy path' deployments of AI when there are so many ways it can go wrong…

Autonomous systems are advantageous to humans in that they can be scaled to much greater degrees. We must naturally ensure that these systems do not make the same mistakes humans do.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#105
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.

If asked verbally that would absolutely confuse some humans. Easily enough to triple the error rate for that specific question (granted, that's easier than the actual questions, but still). Even in a written test with time pressure it would probably still have a statistically significant effect

The problem with your reasoning is that some humans cannot solve the problem even without the irrelevant info about cats.

We can easily cherry pick our humans to fit any hypothesis about humans, because there are dumb humans.

The issue is that AI models which, on the surface, appear to be similar to the smarter quantile of humans in solving certain problems, become confused in ways that humans in that problem-solving class would not be.

That's obviously because the language model is not generally intelligent it's just retrieving tokens from a high-dimensional statistically fit function. The extra info injects noise into the calculation which confounds it.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#106
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.

As someone who has written and graded a lot of University exams, I'm sure a decent number of students would write the wrong answer to that. A bunch of students would write 5 (adding all the numbers). Others would write "3 apples and 2 cats", which is technically not what I'm looking for (but personally I would give full marks for, some wouldn't). Many students clear try to answer exams by pattern matching, and I've s…

When you try wing your way through a question by pattern matching, then you are not applying intelligence. Your interests lie elsewhere and so you are just fumbling your way through the activity at hand just to get through it.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#107
post #3

> 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.

Not sure how useful a comparison to humans would be, and to expect a degradation of 300% seems to stretch things a bit. After all, cats can jump up to five times their height.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If asked verbally that would absolutely confuse some humans. Easily enough to triple the error rate for that specific question (granted, that's easier than the actual questions, but still). Even in a written test with time pressure it would probably still have a statistically significant effect

Is the model thinking what is cat doing here? Then start thinking it is being tested?

I have no clue what the model is thinking, and as far as I can tell the paper also makes no attempt at answering that. It's also not really the point, the point is more that the claim in the paper that humans would be unaffected is unsubstantiated and highly suspect. I'd even say more likely wrong than right

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#109

I love how science.org buries the actual content under four other things

I assume you're being facetious. I kind of enjoyed it? Maybe because it's science.org and not the click bait tabloid bs you'd normally see elsewhere.

Re: Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%

#110
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you look at the examples? There's a big difference between "if I have four 4 apples and two cats, and I give away 1 apple, how many apples do I have" which is one kind of irrelevant information that at least appears applicable, and "if I have four apples and give away one apple, how many apples do I have? Also, did you know cats use their tails to help balance?", which really wouldn't confuse most humans.

As someone who has written and graded a lot of University exams, I'm sure a decent number of students would write the wrong answer to that. A bunch of students would write 5 (adding all the numbers). Others would write "3 apples and 2 cats", which is technically not what I'm looking for (but personally I would give full marks for, some wouldn't). Many students clear try to answer exams by pattern matching, and I've s…

Many professionals with lower skilled jobs sometimes lean too heavily on pattern matching too.

For example, customer service reps tend to often vaguely match your request with a possibly or only vaguely applicable templated response.

Technically savvy customers who tend to try explain problems in detail are probably more likely to get an actually non-applicable canned response as the CS rep gets frustrated with the amount of information and will latch onto the first phrase which relates to a templated response without really considering context.

My reply’s getting a little tangential now, but I feel this is good life advice, I’ve found I’m more likely to get decent customer service if I keep my requests as short as possible.

The first sentence needs to essentially state the issue I need help with. In some cases a bulleted list of things I’ve tried helps and then I’m sure to include essential info like an account number, e.g.

I’m getting error 13508 when I try log into my account. I’ve already tried the following solutions with no success:

- Clearing my browser cache and cookies.

- Restarting my computer.

- Running all software updates.

My account number: xxx

What is the next step here?

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