SIFT: Grounding LLM Reasoning in Contexts via Stickers
Authors: name: Zihao Zeng; name: Xuyao Huang; name: Boxiu Li; name: Zhijie Deng
Published: 2025-02-19 17:38:46

Abstract: This paper identifies the misinterpretation of the context can be a
significant issue during the reasoning process of large language models,
spanning from smaller models like Llama3.2-3B-Instruct to cutting-edge ones
like DeepSeek-R1. For example, in the phrase "10 dollars per kilo," LLMs might
not recognize that "per" means "for each," leading to calculation errors. We
introduce a novel, post-training approach called **Stick to the Facts (SIFT)**
to tackle this. SIFT leverages increasing inference-time compute to ground LLM
reasoning in contexts. At the core of SIFT lies the *Sticker*, which is
generated by the model itself to explicitly emphasize the key information
within the context. Given the curated Sticker, SIFT generates two predictions
-- one from the original query and one from the query augmented with the
Sticker. If they differ, the Sticker is sequentially refined via *forward*
optimization (to better align the extracted facts with the query) and *inverse*
generation (to conform with the model's inherent tendencies) for more faithful
reasoning outcomes. Studies across diverse models (from 3B to 100B+) and
benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K, MATH-500) reveal consistent performance improvements.
Notably, SIFT improves the pass@1 accuracy of DeepSeek-R1 on AIME2024 from
78.33% to **85.67**%, establishing a new state-of-the-art in the open-source
community. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/SIFT.