How Good Are LLMs at Out-of-Distribution Detection?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Bo, Zhan, Liming, Lu, Zexin, Feng, Yujie, Xue, Lei, Wu, Xiao-Ming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Liu, Bo
Zhan, Liming
Lu, Zexin
Feng, Yujie
Xue, Lei
Wu, Xiao-Ming
author_facet Liu, Bo
Zhan, Liming
Lu, Zexin
Feng, Yujie
Xue, Lei
Wu, Xiao-Ming
contents Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of machine learning (ML) models. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift within the ML community, showcasing their exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. While existing research has probed OOD detection with relative small-scale Transformers like BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2, the stark differences in scales, pre-training objectives, and inference paradigms call into question the applicability of these findings to LLMs. This paper embarks on a pioneering empirical investigation of OOD detection in the domain of LLMs, focusing on LLaMA series ranging from 7B to 65B in size. We thoroughly evaluate commonly-used OOD detectors, scrutinizing their performance in both zero-grad and fine-tuning scenarios. Notably, we alter previous discriminative in-distribution fine-tuning into generative fine-tuning, aligning the pre-training objective of LLMs with downstream tasks. Our findings unveil that a simple cosine distance OOD detector demonstrates superior efficacy, outperforming other OOD detectors. We provide an intriguing explanation for this phenomenon by highlighting the isotropic nature of the embedding spaces of LLMs, which distinctly contrasts with the anisotropic property observed in smaller BERT family models. The new insight enhances our understanding of how LLMs detect OOD data, thereby enhancing their adaptability and reliability in dynamic environments. We have released the source code at \url{https://github.com/Awenbocc/LLM-OOD} for other researchers to reproduce our results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_10261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Good Are LLMs at Out-of-Distribution Detection?
Liu, Bo
Zhan, Liming
Lu, Zexin
Feng, Yujie
Xue, Lei
Wu, Xiao-Ming
Computation and Language
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a vital role in enhancing the reliability of machine learning (ML) models. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift within the ML community, showcasing their exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. While existing research has probed OOD detection with relative small-scale Transformers like BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2, the stark differences in scales, pre-training objectives, and inference paradigms call into question the applicability of these findings to LLMs. This paper embarks on a pioneering empirical investigation of OOD detection in the domain of LLMs, focusing on LLaMA series ranging from 7B to 65B in size. We thoroughly evaluate commonly-used OOD detectors, scrutinizing their performance in both zero-grad and fine-tuning scenarios. Notably, we alter previous discriminative in-distribution fine-tuning into generative fine-tuning, aligning the pre-training objective of LLMs with downstream tasks. Our findings unveil that a simple cosine distance OOD detector demonstrates superior efficacy, outperforming other OOD detectors. We provide an intriguing explanation for this phenomenon by highlighting the isotropic nature of the embedding spaces of LLMs, which distinctly contrasts with the anisotropic property observed in smaller BERT family models. The new insight enhances our understanding of how LLMs detect OOD data, thereby enhancing their adaptability and reliability in dynamic environments. We have released the source code at \url{https://github.com/Awenbocc/LLM-OOD} for other researchers to reproduce our results.
title How Good Are LLMs at Out-of-Distribution Detection?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10261