测量并缓解逆向思维链生成中的事后合理化现象 / Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation
1️⃣ 一句话总结
这篇论文发现,AI模型在根据答案倒推解释过程时,会不自觉地被答案‘锚定’而产生事后合理化,作者借鉴心理学理论提出了一种先规划结构再填充细节的新方法,有效降低了模型对答案的依赖,并提升了推理的可靠性。
Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation (RCG) synthesizes reasoning traces from query-answer pairs, but runs the risk of producing post-hoc rationalizations: when models can see the answer during generation, the answer serves as a cognitive anchor that shapes the entire explanation. We formalize this phenomenon through a three-level measurement hierarchy: lexical, entropic, and probabilistic anchoring, each captures surface artifacts, entropy dynamics, and latent answer dependence, respectively. We analyze semantic suppression, the intuitive mitigation strategy that instructs models to ignore the answer, to find out its counterproduction: while it reduces lexical overlap, it paradoxically increases entropic and probabilistic anchoring. Drawing on Ironic Process Theory from cognitive psychology, we attribute this failure to active monitoring of the forbidden answer, which inadvertently deepens dependence on it. To break this cycle, we propose Structural Skeleton-guided Reasoning (SSR), a two-phase approach that first generates an answer-invariant functional skeleton structure, then uses this skeleton to guide full trace generation. By redirecting the information flow to structural planning rather than answer monitoring, SSR consistently reduces anchoring across all three levels. We further introduce Distilled SSR (SSR-D), which fine-tunes models on teacher-generated SSR traces to ensure reliable structural adherence. Experiments across open-ended reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SSR-D achieves up to 10% improvement over suppression baselines while preserving out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization.
测量并缓解逆向思维链生成中的事后合理化现象 / Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation
这篇论文发现,AI模型在根据答案倒推解释过程时,会不自觉地被答案‘锚定’而产生事后合理化,作者借鉴心理学理论提出了一种先规划结构再填充细节的新方法,有效降低了模型对答案的依赖,并提升了推理的可靠性。
源自 arXiv: 2602.14469