这项研究挑战了“人类推理基于抽象模型”的传统观点，对AI开发者和认知科学家都有启发——如果你关心LLM为何会犯“愚蠢”错误，或者想理解人类推理的底层机制，这篇论文值得一读。
该研究通过对比人类与25个大型语言模型在常识推理任务中的表现，发现两者在推理错误上存在相似模式。研究进一步识别出驱动LLM响应的注意力头，这些注意力头实现了模式匹配机制，并能预测人类因无关提示细节而产生的看似不合理的推理错误。结果表明，人类和LLM的日常因果推理更符合模式匹配而非抽象世界模型。
Reasoning as Pattern Matching: Shared Mechanisms in Human and LLM Everyday Reasoning
When large language models (LLMs) fail to generalize or make haphazard errors in reasoning, it is often taken as evidence that LLMs are not truly reasoning, but rather performing a kind of pattern matching. The implication is that people's behavior does not exhibit the same types of failures because human reasoning uses principled and abstract world models. We evaluate human participants and 25 LLMs on their ability to engage in common-sense reasoning about a variety of everyday situations and observe similar patterns of errors in both people and models. We then identify the set of attention heads driving LLM responses and find that these heads implement a form of pattern-matching. These attention heads allow us to predict seemingly inexplicable reasoning errors in people caused by ostensibly irrelevant prompt details. Taken together, our results suggest that everyday causal reasoning in people and LLMs is more consistent with a form of pattern-matching than with abstract world models.