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AI models struggle to learn backtracking search via chain-of-thought fine-tuning

A new research paper explores the limitations of teaching complex reasoning tasks to AI models through chain-of-thought (CoT) fine-tuning. The study found that while models can readily learn forward-computable tasks, they struggle with procedures involving backtracking search, such as cryptarithms. Even with extensive fine-tuning and various methods like RL, the models fail to imitate the search process effectively, instead learning to mimic specific steps without understanding the underlying logic. The research suggests that for tasks requiring search, pre-computing solutions and focusing on memorization and verification is more effective than attempting to teach the search procedure itself. AI

IMPACT Highlights a fundamental limitation in current AI training methods for complex reasoning tasks, suggesting a need for new approaches beyond simple imitation learning.

RANK_REASON Research paper published on arXiv detailing limitations of AI model training.

Read on Hugging Face Daily Papers →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 2 sources. How we write summaries →

AI models struggle to learn backtracking search via chain-of-thought fine-tuning

COVERAGE [2]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Harsh Patel ·

    A Verifiable Search Is Not a Learnable Chain-of-Thought

    It is tempting to assume any task solvable by a short program can be taught to a model as its chain-of-thought: write the steps out, fine-tune, and the model follows. This paper shows the assumption fails for an identifiable class of procedures. The testbed is nine reasoning task…

  2. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

    A Verifiable Search Is Not a Learnable Chain-of-Thought

    Training models on chain-of-thought demonstrations fails for tasks requiring backtracking search because the forward derivation cannot be faithfully imitated, demonstrating a fundamental limitation in learning search procedures through demonstration.