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Summary of Math Neurosurgery: Isolating Language Models’ Math Reasoning Abilities Using Only Forward Passes, by Bryan R. Christ et al.


Math Neurosurgery: Isolating Language Models’ Math Reasoning Abilities Using Only Forward Passes

by Bryan R. Christ, Zack Gottesman, Jonathan Kropko, Thomas Hartvigsen

First submitted to arxiv on: 22 Oct 2024

Categories

  • Main: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
  • Secondary: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

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GrooveSquid.com Paper Summaries

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Summary difficulty Written by Summary
High Paper authors High Difficulty Summary
Read the original abstract here
Medium GrooveSquid.com (original content) Medium Difficulty Summary
This research paper explores the encoding of math reasoning within Large Language Models (LLMs) and whether it can be isolated without affecting non-math behavior. The authors introduce Math Neurosurgery (MathNeuro), a method that efficiently isolates math-specific parameters in LLMs using forward passes. By pruning these identified parameters, they demonstrate a 4-17% improvement in math performance on GSM8K and 5-35% on MATH without affecting general language ability. The approach is also data-efficient, requiring only one sample to identify math-specific parameters.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
Math reasoning is an important aspect of artificial intelligence that has implications for math education. This paper investigates how LLMs encode math reasoning and whether it can be isolated within models. The authors develop a new method called Math Neurosurgery (MathNeuro) that efficiently isolates math-specific parameters in LLMs. They show that by pruning these identified parameters, they can improve math performance without affecting general language ability.

Keywords

» Artificial intelligence  » Pruning