你让AI别思考,它偏要思考
你让大模型「别思考,直接给答案」,它嘴上答应,脑子里照样转。研究者把「不思考」拆成三个可测的层次,测了6个模型、6种提示方式,发现一个普遍现象:越开放的问题,模型越忍不住把推理过程写出来,哪怕你明确禁止。更微妙的是,在选择题上,禁止思考不影响正确率;但到了开放题,「只给答案」和「答得对」开始打架——你越逼它闭嘴,它越容易答错。这不是模型不听话,而是「停止思考」本身就不是一个开关,而是一种需要专门训练的能力。它不是你明天能用上的东西,但它提醒你:当你看到AI「秒回」一个答案时,它可能已经在你看不见的地方想过了。
📄 原文摘要(英文)
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly ship with explicit "thinking modes", yet their counterpart, "no-thinking", has received far less attention. We study LLMs' no-thinking behavior along two axes. a. How to measure no-thinking? Prior work typically defines no-thinking through proxies such as a disabled thinking mode or the absence of long traces. These proxies are unreliable: disabled thinking modes may still emit reasoning, while long traces may contain filler rather than genuine inference. We instead normalize each response into a pre-answer trace and final answer, and evaluate it at three levels: (i) Empty-Thinking Rate for strict answer-only compliance; (ii) instruction-aware Question-Pre-answer Relevance for similarity between the question and pre-answer trace; and (iii) LLM-as-judge Explicit Inference Rate for visible explicit inference. Together, these metrics distinguish answer-only output, relevant but non-inferential text, and explicit inference. b. How does no-thinking vary across tasks and models? We evaluate six prompting interventions on six LLMs across Boolean, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions. We find that explicit no-think controls cannot reliably eliminate visible inference. Models instead exhibit "Thinking Inertia": explicit inference persists even under strict controls and becomes more prevalent as the answer space opens. Accuracy remains stable on Boolean and multiple-choice tasks, whereas open-ended tasks reveal a trade-off between answer-only compliance and task accuracy. Rewriting the same questions across answer spaces shows that supplying candidate answers makes answer-only responses easier to produce. These findings establish no-thinking as a non-trivial capability: stopping explicit reasoning cannot be assumed from model settings or instructions alone and deserves systematic evaluation alongside reasoning ability.