Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mohri, Christopher, Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Mohri, Christopher
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
author_facet Mohri, Christopher
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
contents Guaranteeing the correctness and factuality of language model (LM) outputs is a major open problem. In this work, we propose conformal factuality, a framework that can ensure high probability correctness guarantees for LMs by connecting language modeling and conformal prediction. We observe that the correctness of an LM output is equivalent to an uncertainty quantification problem, where the uncertainty sets are defined as the entailment set of an LM's output. Using this connection, we show that conformal prediction in language models corresponds to a back-off algorithm that provides high probability correctness guarantees by progressively making LM outputs less specific (and expanding the associated uncertainty sets). This approach applies to any black-box LM and requires very few human-annotated samples. Evaluations of our approach on closed book QA (FActScore, NaturalQuestions) and reasoning tasks (MATH) show that our approach can provide 80-90% correctness guarantees while retaining the majority of the LM's original output.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_10978
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees
Mohri, Christopher
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Guaranteeing the correctness and factuality of language model (LM) outputs is a major open problem. In this work, we propose conformal factuality, a framework that can ensure high probability correctness guarantees for LMs by connecting language modeling and conformal prediction. We observe that the correctness of an LM output is equivalent to an uncertainty quantification problem, where the uncertainty sets are defined as the entailment set of an LM's output. Using this connection, we show that conformal prediction in language models corresponds to a back-off algorithm that provides high probability correctness guarantees by progressively making LM outputs less specific (and expanding the associated uncertainty sets). This approach applies to any black-box LM and requires very few human-annotated samples. Evaluations of our approach on closed book QA (FActScore, NaturalQuestions) and reasoning tasks (MATH) show that our approach can provide 80-90% correctness guarantees while retaining the majority of the LM's original output.
title Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10978