Reverse Training to Nurse the Reversal Curse
Olga Golovneva Zeyuan Allen-Zhu Jason Weston Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Large language models (LLMs) have a surprising failure: when trained on "A
has a feature B", they do not generalize to "B is a feature of A", which is
termed the Reversal Curse. Even when training with trillions of tokens this
issue still appears due to Zipf's law - hence even if we train on the entire
internet. This work proposes an alternative training scheme, called reverse
training, whereby all words are used twice, doubling the amount of available
tokens. The LLM is trained in both forward and reverse directions by reversing
the training strings while preserving (i.e., not reversing) chosen substrings,
such as entities. We show that data-matched reverse-trained models provide
superior performance to standard models on standard tasks, and compute-matched
reverse-trained models provide far superior performance on reversal tasks,
helping resolve the reversal curse issue.