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While large language models (LLMs) showcase unprecedented capabilities, they also exhibit certain inherent limitations when facing seemingly trivial tasks. A prime example is the recently debated "reversal curse", which surfaces when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Zhengkai Lin , Zhihang Fu , Kai Liu , Liang Xie , Binbin Lin , Wenxiao Wang , Deng Cai , Yue Wu , Jieping Ye

The reversal curse describes a failure of autoregressive language models to retrieve a fact in reverse order (e.g., training on ``$A > B$'' but failing on ``$B < A$''). Recent work shows that objectives with bidirectional supervision (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Julian Coda-Forno , Jane X. Wang , Arslan Chaudhry

Auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) show impressive capacities to solve many complex reasoning tasks while struggling with some simple logical reasoning tasks such as inverse search: when trained on '$A \to B$' (e.g., 'Tom is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Hanlin Zhu , Baihe Huang , Shaolun Zhang , Michael Jordan , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Stuart Russell

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks, recent studies showcase that causal LLMs suffer from the "reversal curse". It is a typical example that the model knows "A's father is B", but is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Qingyan Guo , Rui Wang , Junliang Guo , Xu Tan , Jiang Bian , Yujiu Yang

Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sicheng Yu , Yuanchen Xu , Cunxiao Du , Yanying Zhou , Minghui Qiu , Qianru Sun , Hao Zhang , Jiawei Wu

Recent research observed a noteworthy phenomenon in large language models (LLMs), referred to as the ``reversal curse.'' The reversal curse is that when dealing with two entities, denoted as $a$ and $b$, connected by their relation $R$ and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Ang Lv , Kaiyi Zhang , Shufang Xie , Quan Tu , Yuhan Chen , Ji-Rong Wen , Rui Yan

Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs exhibit a basic generalization failure known as the Reversal Curse, where they struggle to learn reversible factual associations. Understanding why this occurs could help identify weaknesses in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Boshi Wang , Huan Sun

Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many complex tasks, yet they can still fail in very simple logical reasoning such as the "reversal curse" -- when trained on forward knowledge data of the form…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xutao Ma , Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Somayeh Sojoudi

Work on scaling laws has found that large language models (LMs) show predictable improvements to overall loss with increased scale (model size, training data, and compute). Here, we present evidence for the claim that LMs may show inverse…

The term "Reversal Curse" refers to the scenario where auto-regressive decoder large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A," assuming that B and A are distinct and can be uniquely identified from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Da Wu , Jingye Yang , Kai Wang

We introduce the concept of the self-referencing causal cycle (abbreviated RECALL) - a mechanism that enables large language models (LLMs) to bypass the limitations of unidirectional causality, which underlies a phenomenon known as the…

Today's best language models still struggle with hallucinations: factually incorrect generations, which impede their ability to reliably retrieve information seen during training. The reversal curse, where models cannot recall information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ouail Kitouni , Niklas Nolte , Diane Bouchacourt , Adina Williams , Mike Rabbat , Mark Ibrahim

Large Language Models (LLMs) are large-scale pretrained models that have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. These successes have been driven by unprecedented complexity and scale in both data and computations. However, due…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Lukas Berglund , Meg Tong , Max Kaufmann , Mikita Balesni , Asa Cooper Stickland , Tomasz Korbak , Owain Evans

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms often require long training to become useful, especially in complex environments with sparse rewards. While techniques like reward shaping and curriculum learning exist to accelerate training, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Lukas Toral , Teddy Lazebnik

Language Models (LMs) exhibit two distinct mechanisms for knowledge acquisition: in-weights learning (i.e., encoding information within the model weights) and in-context learning (ICL). Although these two modes offer complementary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Arslan Chaudhry , Sridhar Thiagarajan , Andrew Lampinen

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Moongyu Jeon , Sangwoo Shin , BumJun Kim , Kyelim Lee , Albert No

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Eshed Gal , Moshe Eliasof , Javier Turek , Uri Ascher , Eran Treister , Eldad Haber

The "reversal curse" refers to the phenomenon where large language models (LLMs) exhibit predominantly unidirectional behavior when processing logically bidirectional relationships. Prior work attributed this to autoregressive training --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shaokai He , Kaiwen Wei , Xinyi Zeng , Xiang Chen , Xue Yang , Zhenyang Li , Jiang Zhong , Yu Tian

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in agentic and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where they must execute user-specified tasks over externally provided reference text. In practice, such context is often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zeli Su , Zhankai Xu , Tianlei Chen , Longfei Zheng , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Wentao Zhang
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