Thrust: Adaptively Propels Large Language Models with External Knowledge

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Xinran, Zhang, Hongming, Pan, Xiaoman, Yao, Wenlin, Yu, Dong, Chen, Jianshu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Zhao, Xinran
Zhang, Hongming
Pan, Xiaoman
Yao, Wenlin
Yu, Dong
Chen, Jianshu
author_facet Zhao, Xinran
Zhang, Hongming
Pan, Xiaoman
Yao, Wenlin
Yu, Dong
Chen, Jianshu
contents Although large-scale pre-trained language models (PTLMs) are shown to encode rich knowledge in their model parameters, the inherent knowledge in PTLMs can be opaque or static, making external knowledge necessary. However, the existing information retrieval techniques could be costly and may even introduce noisy and sometimes misleading knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the instance-level adaptive propulsion of external knowledge (IAPEK), where we only conduct the retrieval when necessary. To achieve this goal, we propose measuring whether a PTLM contains enough knowledge to solve an instance with a novel metric, Thrust, which leverages the representation distribution of a small number of seen instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that thrust is a good measurement of PTLM models' instance-level knowledgeability. Moreover, we can achieve significantly higher cost-efficiency with the Thrust score as the retrieval indicator than the naive usage of external knowledge on 88% of the evaluated tasks with 26% average performance improvement. Such findings shed light on the real-world practice of knowledge-enhanced LMs with a limited knowledge-seeking budget due to computation latency or costs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_10442
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thrust: Adaptively Propels Large Language Models with External Knowledge
Zhao, Xinran
Zhang, Hongming
Pan, Xiaoman
Yao, Wenlin
Yu, Dong
Chen, Jianshu
Computation and Language
Although large-scale pre-trained language models (PTLMs) are shown to encode rich knowledge in their model parameters, the inherent knowledge in PTLMs can be opaque or static, making external knowledge necessary. However, the existing information retrieval techniques could be costly and may even introduce noisy and sometimes misleading knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the instance-level adaptive propulsion of external knowledge (IAPEK), where we only conduct the retrieval when necessary. To achieve this goal, we propose measuring whether a PTLM contains enough knowledge to solve an instance with a novel metric, Thrust, which leverages the representation distribution of a small number of seen instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that thrust is a good measurement of PTLM models' instance-level knowledgeability. Moreover, we can achieve significantly higher cost-efficiency with the Thrust score as the retrieval indicator than the naive usage of external knowledge on 88% of the evaluated tasks with 26% average performance improvement. Such findings shed light on the real-world practice of knowledge-enhanced LMs with a limited knowledge-seeking budget due to computation latency or costs.
title Thrust: Adaptively Propels Large Language Models with External Knowledge
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10442