Identity Crisis: How a Trivial Trick Teaches LLMs to Think Backwards
Facts are rude. They rarely arrive in the direction your software needs them. A customer database may know that Alice reports to Bob, while the compliance officer asks, “Who reports to Bob?” A product catalog may store that SKU-17 belongs to Category X, while the chatbot receives, “Show me all products in Category X.” A medical knowledge base may encode one directional relation, while the user asks for the inverse. Humans treat these as the same fact seen from opposite ends. Language models, being very expensive autocomplete machines with a talent for plausible theater, do not always share our confidence. ...