Meta-Cognitive Analysis: Evaluating Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Datasets and Large Language Models

Zhuoqun Li, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Hao Xiang, Xianpei Han, Le Sun


Abstract
Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge are two key parts in meta-cognitive theory, and these two hold significant importance in pre-training and inference of LLMs. However, a comprehensive analysis comparing these two types of knowledge is lacking, primarily due to challenges in definition, probing and quantitative assessment. In this paper, we explore from a new perspective by providing ground-truth knowledge for LLMs and evaluating the effective score. Through extensive experiments with widely-used datasets and models, we get conclusions: (1) In most tasks, benefits from declarative knowledge are greater than those from procedural knowledge. (2) Profits of procedural knowledge are larger than declarative knowledge only in reasoning tasks with simple logic. (3) As pre-training progresses and size increases, model ability to utilize both kinds of knowledge significantly improves, but in different speed. We do detailed analysis for the findings and this can provide primary guidance for evaluation and enhancement of large language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.980
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
11222–11228
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.980
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhuoqun Li, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Hao Xiang, Xianpei Han, and Le Sun. 2024. Meta-Cognitive Analysis: Evaluating Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Datasets and Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 11222–11228, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Meta-Cognitive Analysis: Evaluating Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Datasets and Large Language Models (Li et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.980.pdf