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ACL Findings2025

Neutralizing Bias in LLM Reasoning using Entailment Graphs

Liang Cheng, Tianyi Li, Zhaowei Wang, Tianyang Liu, Mark Steedman

Abstract

LLMs are often claimed to be capable of Natural Language Inference (NLI), which is widely regarded as a cornerstone of more complex forms of reasoning. However, recent works show that LLMs still suffer from hallucinations in NLI due to attestation bias, where LLMs overly rely on propositional memory to build shortcuts. To solve the issue, we design an unsupervised framework to construct counterfactual reasoning data and fine-tune LLMs to reduce attestation bias. To measure bias reduction, we build bias-adversarial variants of NLI datasets with randomly replaced predicates in premises while keeping hypotheses unchanged. Extensive evaluations show that our framework can significantly reduce hallucinations from attestation bias. Then, we further evaluate LLMs fine-tuned with our framework on original NLI datasets and their bias-neutralized versions, where original entities are replaced with randomly sampled ones. Extensive results show that our framework consistently improves inferential performance on both original and bias-neutralized NLI datasets.

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Builds on10

  1. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
  2. LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
  3. Learning The Difference That Makes A Difference With Counterfactually-Augmented DataDivyansh Kaushik, Eduard H. Hovy, Zachary Chase LiptonICLR 2020 · 625 citations
  4. Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A SurveyJie Huang, Kevin Chen-Chuan ChangACL Findings 2023 · 428 citations
  5. Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference TasksNick McKenna, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mohammad Javad Hosseini et al.EMNLP Findings 2023 · 142 citations

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