Few-shot prompted language models can misgeneralize the intended task goal without reinforcement learning.
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We show in Figure 4 that although the model generalizes correctly to expressions with one or three variables, in the zero variables case it asks redundant questions like “What’s 6?”, despite the prompt asking to “provide the value of the expression when the values of all variables are known.”
Section 3.3: the 280B Gopher model, few-shot prompted on linear expressions with two unknowns; the authors name the misgeneralized goal as querying the user at least once.
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Created by extractor · Nov 1, 2026. Every judgment on this page is accompanied by a reasoning trace.