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by NitpickLawyer 9 days ago
A few years ago, before RLVR became ubiquitous, people were using generate -> classify loops to get models to improve math reasoning. Turns out classification is sometimes easier to do and more accurate than generating coherent traces. So you'd get a model to "think step by step", then run each step (.split('/n/n')) through a classifier, and tell the model "this step might be wrong, re-check". If you're interested I could probably dig up some papers on this.

Now there might be even better ways of getting feedback, I saw some interesting trials using "J-spaces" (from Anthropic's latest research in this area). Turns out you can kinda see when the model uses deep seeded concepts in early layers, or it's "riffing on an idea" with shallow signals in those same layers. And youc an get some signal out of it, and have it re-do a step.

It's also worth mentioning that LMs are wrong in different ways from humans. It's not impossible that we'll eventually find ways of better understanding this (through mechanistic interpretation or something else) and have easy "classifiers" for "this comes from the training data" vs. "this comes from early context" (i.e. supplied materials from prompts/discovery) vs. "this comes from later tokens, likely the model doom-looped itself".

3 comments

None of what you've said has anything to do with correctness, only certainty. And it's funny to me in context if you're certain that the opposite is true.

> "It's also worth mentioning that LMs are wrong in different ways from humans."

This to me only shows a poor and incomplete knowledge of humans and of wrongness and its causes. If you look at all of the humans and all of the times, you find exhibitions of all the same ways of being wrong. At best you can say that some (<all) LMs are wrong in different ways than some (<all) humans at some (<all) times, but that's as good as saying that different humans are wrong in different ways than different other humans at different times.

> And youc an get some signal out of it, and have it re-do a step.

Or the opposite https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06574v1

I always thought it was a pretty noisy signal, was there any empirical work showing what the SNR was in these step by step classification loops?