Question Tokens Deserve More Attention: Enhancing Large Language Models without Training through Step-by-Step Reading and Question Attention Recalibration

Abstract: LLMs often struggle with tasks that require a deep understanding of complex questions, especially when faced with long-range dependencies or multi-step reasoning. This work investigates the limitations of current LLMs in question comprehension and identifies three insights: (1) repeating question tokens improves comprehension by increasing attention to question regions, (2) increased backward dependencies negatively affect performance due to unidirectional attentional constraints, and (3) recalibrating attentional mechanisms to prioritize question-relevant regions improves performance. Based on these findings, we first propose a family of prompt-based strategies - Step-by-Step Reading (SSR), SSR+, and SSR++ - that guide LLMs to incrementally process question tokens and align their reasoning with the input structure. These methods significantly improve performance, with SSR++ achieving state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks: 96.66% on GSM8K, 94.61% on ASDiv, and 76.28% on AQuA. Second, we introduce a training-free attention recalibration mechanism that dynamically adjusts attention distributions during inference to emphasize question-relevant regions. This method improves the accuracy of LLaMA 3.1-8B on AQuA by 5.17% without changing model parameters or input prompts. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of structured prompt design and attention optimization in improving LLM comprehension, providing lightweight yet effective tools for improving performance in various NLP tasks.