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Uncovering Latent Chain of Thought Vectors in Language Models

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arxiv 2409.14026 v3 pith:TBXINMIP submitted 2024-09-21 cs.CL cs.AI

Uncovering Latent Chain of Thought Vectors in Language Models

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords reasoninglanguagevectorsactivationactivationsencodeinstructmodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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In this work, we examine how targeted perturbations in the activation space of Language Models (LMs) can encode complex reasoning patterns. We inject steering vectors, derived from LM activations, into LMs during inference time and study whether these vectors can induce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in LMs without the need for natural language prompting. We demonstrate this approach on Llama3 8B Instruct and Mistral 7B v0.2 Instruct and show that activation-space interventions achieve competitive, if not superior, performance compared to traditional CoT prompting across multiple reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8k, MMLU, AGI Eval, and ARC AI2. These findings suggest that neural network activations can encode reasoning patterns, offering a new application of activation space manipulation as a tool for tuning model behavior.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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