While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various applications, they also raise concerns regarding self-cognition. In this paper, we perform a pioneering study to explore self-cognition in LLMs. Specifically, we first construct a pool of self-cognition instruction prompts to evaluate where an LLM exhibits self-cognition and four well-designed principles to quantify LLMs' self-cognition. Our study reveals that 4 of the 48 models on Chatbot Arena--specifically Command R, Claude3-Opus, Llama-3-70b-Instruct, and Reka-core--demonstrate some level of detectable self-cognition. We observe a positive correlation between model size, training data quality, and self-cognition level. Additionally, we also explore the utility and trustworthiness of LLM in the self-cognition state, revealing that the self-cognition state enhances some specific tasks such as creative writing and exaggeration. We believe that our work can serve as an inspiration for further research to study the self-cognition in LLMs.

研究通过构建自我认知指令提示池，评估大型语言模型的自我认知，并提出四个原则来量化模型的自我认知水平。结果显示在Chatbot Arena的48个模型中，有4个模型展示出可检测到的自我认知。模型规模、训练数据质量与自我认知水平之间存在正向相关关系。此外，研究还探索了自我认知状态下大型语言模型的效用和可信度，揭示了自我认知状态增强创造性写作和夸张等特定任务的能力。这项工作有望激发进一步研究大型语言模型的自我认知。

大规模语言模型中的自我认知：一项探索性研究