oai:arXiv.org:2410.13779
Computer Science
2024
23/10/2024
The recently introduced path-star task is a minimal task designed to exemplify limitations to the abilities of language models (Bachmann and Nagarajan, 2024).
It involves a path-star graph where multiple arms radiate from a single starting node and each node is unique.
Given the start node and a specified target node that ends an arm, the task is to generate the arm containing that target node.
This is straightforward for a human but surprisingly difficult for language models, which did not outperform the random baseline.
The authors hypothesized this is due to a deficiency in teacher-forcing and the next-token prediction paradigm.
We demonstrate the task is learnable using teacher-forcing in alternative settings and that the issue is partially due to representation.
We introduce a regularization method using structured samples of the same graph but with differing target nodes, improving results across a variety of model types.
We provide RASP proofs showing the task is theoretically solvable.
Finally, we find settings where an encoder-only model can consistently solve the task.
;Comment: EMNLP 2024 Main
Frydenlund, Arvid, 2024, The Mystery of the Pathological Path-star Task for Language Models