{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/how-much-do-llms-learn-from-negative-examples","title":"How much do LLMs learn from negative examples?","arxiv_id":"2503.14391","date":"2025-03-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shadi Hamdan","Deniz Yuret"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) undergo a three-phase training process: unsupervised pre-training, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and learning from human feedback (RLHF/DPO). Notably, it is during the final phase that these models are exposed to negative examples -- incorrect, rejected, or suboptimal responses to queries. This paper delves into the role of negative examples in the training of LLMs, using a likelihood-ratio (Likra) model on multiple-choice question answering benchmarks to precisely manage the influence and the volume of negative examples. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) During a critical phase in training, Likra with negative examples demonstrates a significantly larger improvement per training example compared to SFT using only positive examples. This leads to a sharp jump in the learning curve for Likra unlike the smooth and gradual improvement of SFT; (2) negative examples that are plausible but incorrect (near-misses) exert a greater influence; and (3) while training with positive examples fails to significantly decrease the likelihood of plausible but incorrect answers, training with negative examples more accurately identifies them. These results indicate a potentially significant role for negative examples in improving accuracy and reducing hallucinations for LLMs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14391v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14391v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"how-much-do-llms-learn-from-negative-examples","repo_url":"https://github.com/shamdan17/likra","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multiple-choice","task_name":"Multiple-choice"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-pre-training","task_name":"Unsupervised Pre-training"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"sft","method_name":"SFT"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}