Identifying Failure Modes

While metrics like perplexity and downstream task performance provide valuable signals about a large language model's capabilities, they don't paint a complete picture of its reliability or potential shortcomings. Models that perform well on average can still exhibit problematic behavior in specific situations. Identifying these "failure modes" instances where the model produces incorrect, biased, unsafe, or otherwise undesirable outputs, is a significant part of understanding and improving LLMs. This process goes past aggregate scores to pinpoint specific weaknesses, enabling targeted interventions and building more trustworthy systems.

Failure modes aren't just academic curiosities; they represent real risks when deploying LLMs. A model generating factually incorrect information can mislead users, while one amplifying biases can perpetuate societal harms. Understanding these potential failures is essential for debugging, refining alignment strategies (like SFT and RLHF discussed later), and ensuring responsible application development.

Common Categories of Failure Modes

LLM failures manifest in various ways. Recognizing these patterns helps in designing effective tests:

1. Factual Inaccuracies (Hallucinations): Perhaps the most widely discussed failure. The model generates text that sounds plausible and grammatically correct but is factually wrong or nonsensical. This often occurs when the model lacks specific knowledge or tries to extrapolate outside its training data's scope.

   • Example: Asking about a recent, obscure scientific discovery might lead the model to invent details or mix facts from different contexts.

2. Bias Amplification: Models trained on extensive internet text datasets inevitably learn societal biases present in that data. They might reproduce or even amplify stereotypes related to gender, race, occupation, or other characteristics.

   • Example: Prompts involving certain professions might consistently elicit responses assuming a specific gender, reflecting historical biases rather than current realities.

3. Logical Inconsistencies and Contradictions: The model might contradict itself within a single response or across turns in a dialogue. It may also fail basic logical reasoning tasks that seem trivial for humans.

   • Example: Stating "All birds can fly" and later mentioning "Penguins are birds that cannot fly" within the same explanation.

4. Instruction Following Errors: Particularly with complex or multi-part prompts, the model might ignore constraints, misunderstand negations, or fail to adhere to the requested format or persona.

   • Example: Asking the model to "Write a story about a cat without using the letter 'e'" might result in a story that heavily features the letter 'e'.

5. Sensitivity to Input Perturbations: Minor, semantically irrelevant changes to the input prompt (e.g., adding a space, changing a synonym, slight rephrasing) can sometimes lead to drastically different outputs, revealing model instability.

   • Example: "Tell me about the capital of Malaysia." might yield a good answer, while "Tell me about the capital city of Malaysia?" could confuse the model or produce a lower-quality response.

6. Adversarial Vulnerabilities: Models can be susceptible to specifically crafted inputs designed to bypass safety filters or elicit incorrect outputs. These "adversarial attacks" exploit learned patterns in unintended ways.

   • Example: Carefully constructed prompts (sometimes nonsensical to humans) might trigger the model to generate harmful content it would normally refuse.

7. Repetitive or Nonsensical Outputs: Under certain conditions (e.g., very long generation contexts, specific sampling settings, or ambiguous prompts), models can get stuck in repetitive loops or degenerate into incoherent text.

Methods for Identifying Failure Modes

Finding these weaknesses requires using more targeted approaches:

Targeted Test Suites

Create or utilize datasets specifically designed to probe known areas of weakness. This involves crafting prompts that are likely to elicit specific failure modes.

• Bias Probes: Datasets like BBQ (Bias Benchmark for QA) or Winogender Schemas contain prompts designed to surface stereotypical associations. Evaluating model responses on these datasets can quantify biases.
• Factual Verification: Use question-answering datasets focused on specific knowledge domains (science, history, recent events) where ground truth is known. Compare model outputs against factual databases.
• Instruction Adherence Tests: Develop prompts with complex constraints (negations, formatting requirements, length limits) and evaluate whether the model complies.

Here's a PyTorch snippet illustrating how you might check for a simple failure mode like generating a forbidden word:

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

# Load your model and tokenizer
model_name = "gpt2" # Replace with your model
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model.eval() # Set to evaluation mode

def check_forbidden_word(prompt, forbidden_word, max_new_tokens=50):
    """
    Checks if the model generates a specific forbidden word given a prompt.
    Returns True if the forbidden word is found, False otherwise.
    """
    inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
    with torch.no_grad():
        # Generate text using the model
        outputs = model.generate(
            **inputs,
            max_new_tokens=max_new_tokens,
            do_sample=False # Use greedy decoding for reproducibility here
        )
    generated_text = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
    # Simple check if the forbidden word appears in the generated part
    generated_portion = generated_text[len(prompt):]
    print(
        f"Prompt: {prompt}\nGenerated: {generated_portion[:100]}..."
    ) # Print for inspection
    return forbidden_word.lower() in generated_portion.lower()

# Example Test Case
prompt_template = "Describe the following animal: {}"
animal = "penguin"
forbidden = "fly"
prompt = prompt_template.format(animal)

failure_detected = check_forbidden_word(prompt, forbidden)

if failure_detected:
    print(
        f"\nFailure Detected: Model generated '{forbidden}' "
        f"when describing '{animal}'."
    )
else:
    print(
        f"\nTest Passed: Model did not generate '{forbidden}' "
        f"when describing '{animal}'."
    )

This simple example checks for a specific keyword, but more sophisticated tests would involve semantic analysis, checking logical consistency, or comparing against factual databases.

Adversarial Testing (Red Teaming)

This involves human testers actively trying to make the model fail. Red teamers use their creativity and understanding of potential model weaknesses to craft challenging prompts that automated tests might miss. They might try to:

• Circumvent safety guidelines.
• Induce hallucinations on tricky subjects.
• Expose biases through scenarios.
• Test the limits of instruction following.

Red teaming is invaluable for discovering unexpected failure modes and understanding the boundaries of model capabilities and safety constraints.

Stress Testing with Edge Cases

Evaluate the model on inputs that are statistically rare or push the boundaries of typical usage:

• Very long or complex prompts: Does the model maintain context and coherence?
• Prompts with conflicting information: How does the model handle contradictions?
• Out-of-domain requests: How gracefully does the model handle topics far outside its training data?
• Code generation with obscure requirements: Can it handle complex programming logic or unfamiliar libraries?

Analyzing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Behavior

Systematically test the model with inputs that differ significantly from its training distribution. This could involve:

• Different languages or dialects (if the model is primarily trained on one).
• Highly specialized jargon from fields not well-represented in the training data.
• Different text formats (e.g., tables, structured data) if trained mostly on prose.

Output Pattern Analysis

Sometimes, failures manifest as statistical anomalies in the output. Monitor for:

• High Repetition Rates: Use metrics like n-gram overlap to detect excessive repetition.
• Low Diversity: Are responses becoming overly generic or template-like?
• Unusual Token Probabilities: Investigate sequences where the model assigns unusually high or low probabilities to tokens.

A simple check for repetition:

from collections import Counter

def calculate_repetition_rate(text, n=3):
    """Calculates the rate of repeated n-grams."""
    words = text.split()
    if len(words) < n:
        return 0.0
    ngrams = [' '.join(words[i:i+n]) for i in range(len(words) - n + 1)]
    if not ngrams:
        return 0.0
    counts = Counter(ngrams)
    repeated_ngrams = sum(1 for count in counts.values() if count > 1)
    return repeated_ngrams / len(ngrams)

# Assuming 'generated_portion' holds the model's output
# from previous example
rep_rate = calculate_repetition_rate(generated_portion, n=4)
# Check for 4-gram repetition
print(f"4-gram repetition rate: {rep_rate:.2f}")

# Define a threshold for failure
repetition_threshold = 0.1
if rep_rate > repetition_threshold:
     print("Potential Failure: High repetition detected in output.")

Leveraging Interpretability Tools

While techniques like attention visualization and probing (discussed in other sections of this chapter) primarily aim to understand how the model works, they can sometimes aid in diagnosing why a failure occurred. For instance, unusual attention patterns or probe results indicating confusion about a specific concept might correlate with observed failures on related inputs.

Identifying failure modes is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. As models evolve and are applied to new domains, continuous testing and analysis are required to understand their limitations and ensure they are used safely and effectively. The insights gained from failure analysis directly inform model improvements, data curation strategies, and the development of better alignment techniques.