Linear Correlation in LM's Compositional Generalization and
  Hallucination
Authors: name: Letian Peng; name: Chenyang An; name: Shibo Hao; name: Chengyu Dong; name: Jingbo Shang
Published: 2025-02-06 21:44:30

Abstract: The generalization of language models (LMs) is undergoing active debates,
contrasting their potential for general intelligence with their struggles with
basic knowledge composition (e.g., reverse/transition curse). This paper
uncovers the phenomenon of linear correlations in LMs during knowledge
composition. For explanation, there exists a linear transformation between
certain related knowledge that maps the next token prediction logits from one
prompt to another, e.g., "X lives in the city of" rightarrow "X lives in the
country of" for every given X. This mirrors the linearity in human knowledge
composition, such as Paris rightarrow France. Our findings indicate that the
linear transformation is resilient to large-scale fine-tuning, generalizing
updated knowledge when aligned with real-world relationships, but causing
hallucinations when it deviates. Empirical results suggest that linear
correlation can serve as a potential identifier of LM's generalization.
Finally, we show such linear correlations can be learned with a single
feedforward network and pre-trained vocabulary representations, indicating LM
generalization heavily relies on the latter.