Understanding Chain-of-Thought in LLMs Through Information Theory
Keywords: Large Language models, Chain-of-thought
TL;DR: We formalize a framework for evaluating Chain of thought reasoning using Information theory, The proposed operationalised method allows us to detect failure modes in LLMs at a better rate than existing methods.
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks through the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, allowing models to break down problems into manageable sub-tasks. However, existing CoT evaluation techniques either require annotated CoT data or fall short in accurately assessing intermediate reasoning steps, leading to high rates of false positives. In this paper, we formalize CoT reasoning in LLMs through an information-theoretic lens. Specifically, our framework quantifies the `information gain' at each reasoning step, enabling the identification of failure modes in LLMs without the need for expensive annotated datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on toy and GSM-8K data, where it significantly outperforms existing outcome-based methods by providing more accurate insights into model performance on individual tasks.
Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
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Submission Number: 11554
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