Measuring and Reducing LLM Hallucination without Gold-Standard Answers

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wei, Jiaheng, Yao, Yuanshun, Ton, Jean-Francois, Guo, Hongyi, Estornell, Andrew, Liu, Yang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Wei, Jiaheng
Yao, Yuanshun
Ton, Jean-Francois
Guo, Hongyi
Estornell, Andrew
Liu, Yang
author_facet Wei, Jiaheng
Yao, Yuanshun
Ton, Jean-Francois
Guo, Hongyi
Estornell, Andrew
Liu, Yang
contents LLM hallucination, i.e. generating factually incorrect yet seemingly convincing answers, is currently a major threat to the trustworthiness and reliability of LLMs. The first step towards solving this complicated problem is to measure it. However, existing hallucination metrics require having a benchmark dataset with gold-standard answers, i.e. "best" or "correct" answers written by humans. Such requirements make hallucination measurement costly and prone to human errors. In this work, we propose Factualness Evaluations via Weighting LLMs (FEWL), an innovative hallucination metric that is specifically designed for the scenario when gold-standard answers are absent. FEWL leverages the answers from off-the-shelf LLMs that serve as a proxy of gold-standard answers. The key challenge is how to quantify the expertise of reference LLMs resourcefully. We show FEWL has certain theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirically it gives more accurate hallucination measures than naively using reference LLMs. We also show how to leverage FEWL to reduce hallucination through both in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiment results on Truthful-QA, CHALE, and HaluEval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FEWL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_10412
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring and Reducing LLM Hallucination without Gold-Standard Answers
Wei, Jiaheng
Yao, Yuanshun
Ton, Jean-Francois
Guo, Hongyi
Estornell, Andrew
Liu, Yang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
LLM hallucination, i.e. generating factually incorrect yet seemingly convincing answers, is currently a major threat to the trustworthiness and reliability of LLMs. The first step towards solving this complicated problem is to measure it. However, existing hallucination metrics require having a benchmark dataset with gold-standard answers, i.e. "best" or "correct" answers written by humans. Such requirements make hallucination measurement costly and prone to human errors. In this work, we propose Factualness Evaluations via Weighting LLMs (FEWL), an innovative hallucination metric that is specifically designed for the scenario when gold-standard answers are absent. FEWL leverages the answers from off-the-shelf LLMs that serve as a proxy of gold-standard answers. The key challenge is how to quantify the expertise of reference LLMs resourcefully. We show FEWL has certain theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirically it gives more accurate hallucination measures than naively using reference LLMs. We also show how to leverage FEWL to reduce hallucination through both in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiment results on Truthful-QA, CHALE, and HaluEval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of FEWL.
title Measuring and Reducing LLM Hallucination without Gold-Standard Answers
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10412