{"paper":{"title":"The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on \"A is B\" fail to learn \"B is A\"","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Asa Cooper Stickland, Lukas Berglund, Max Kaufmann, Meg Tong, Mikita Balesni, Owain Evans, Tomasz Korbak","submitted_at":"2023-09-21T17:52:19Z","abstract_excerpt":"We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form \"A is B\", it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction \"B is A\". This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on \"Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space\", it will not automatically be able to answer the question, \"Who was the first woman to travel to space?\". Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer (\"Valentina Tershkova\") will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models do not gen"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2309.12288","kind":"arxiv","version":4},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2309.12288/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}