these results demonstrate a case where LLMs can do (very basic) meta-cognition without CoT
Why do you believe this is meta-cognition? (Or maybe the question is, what do you mean by meta-cognition?)
It seems like it could easily be something else. For example, probably when solving problems the model looks at the past strategies it has used and tries some other strategy to increase the likelihood of solving the problem. It does this primarily in the token space (looking at past reasoning and trying new stuff) but this also generalizes somewhat to the activation space (looking at what past forward passes did and trying something else). So when you have filler tokens the latter effect still happens, giving a slight best-of-N type boost, producing your observed results.
By meta-cognition, in this context I mean “somewhat flexibly deciding what to think about / allocate cognition to in at least some cases”. More generally, I meant “this probably shows some type of internal cognitive sophistication of a type you might not have thought LLMs had”. I didn’t really mean anything very precise or to make a very strong claim. and probably in retrospect, I should have said something other than meta-cognition.
Also, I agree that it could be something else that it is not that interesting and doesn’t correspond to “somewhat flexibly deciding what to think about” and isn’t well described as very basic metacognition; probably my language was insufficiently caveated.
Cool result!
Why do you believe this is meta-cognition? (Or maybe the question is, what do you mean by meta-cognition?)
It seems like it could easily be something else. For example, probably when solving problems the model looks at the past strategies it has used and tries some other strategy to increase the likelihood of solving the problem. It does this primarily in the token space (looking at past reasoning and trying new stuff) but this also generalizes somewhat to the activation space (looking at what past forward passes did and trying something else). So when you have filler tokens the latter effect still happens, giving a slight best-of-N type boost, producing your observed results.
By meta-cognition, in this context I mean “somewhat flexibly deciding what to think about / allocate cognition to in at least some cases”. More generally, I meant “this probably shows some type of internal cognitive sophistication of a type you might not have thought LLMs had”. I didn’t really mean anything very precise or to make a very strong claim. and probably in retrospect, I should have said something other than meta-cognition.
Also, I agree that it could be something else that it is not that interesting and doesn’t correspond to “somewhat flexibly deciding what to think about” and isn’t well described as very basic metacognition; probably my language was insufficiently caveated.