Likelihood-based Mitigation of Evaluation Bias in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Oi, Masanari, Kaneko, Masahiro, Koike, Ryuto, Loem, Mengsay, Okazaki, Naoaki
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Oi, Masanari
Kaneko, Masahiro
Koike, Ryuto
Loem, Mengsay
Okazaki, Naoaki
author_facet Oi, Masanari
Kaneko, Masahiro
Koike, Ryuto
Loem, Mengsay
Okazaki, Naoaki
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used to evaluate natural language generation tasks as automated metrics. However, the likelihood, a measure of LLM's plausibility for a sentence, can vary due to superficial differences in sentences, such as word order and sentence structure. It is therefore possible that there might be a likelihood bias if LLMs are used for evaluation: they might overrate sentences with higher likelihoods while underrating those with lower likelihoods. In this paper, we investigate the presence and impact of likelihood bias in LLM-based evaluators. We also propose a method to mitigate the likelihood bias. Our method utilizes highly biased instances as few-shot examples for in-context learning. Our experiments in evaluating the data-to-text and grammatical error correction tasks reveal that several LLMs we test display a likelihood bias. Furthermore, our proposed method successfully mitigates this bias, also improving evaluation performance (in terms of correlation of models with human scores) significantly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Likelihood-based Mitigation of Evaluation Bias in Large Language Models
Oi, Masanari
Kaneko, Masahiro
Koike, Ryuto
Loem, Mengsay
Okazaki, Naoaki
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used to evaluate natural language generation tasks as automated metrics. However, the likelihood, a measure of LLM's plausibility for a sentence, can vary due to superficial differences in sentences, such as word order and sentence structure. It is therefore possible that there might be a likelihood bias if LLMs are used for evaluation: they might overrate sentences with higher likelihoods while underrating those with lower likelihoods. In this paper, we investigate the presence and impact of likelihood bias in LLM-based evaluators. We also propose a method to mitigate the likelihood bias. Our method utilizes highly biased instances as few-shot examples for in-context learning. Our experiments in evaluating the data-to-text and grammatical error correction tasks reveal that several LLMs we test display a likelihood bias. Furthermore, our proposed method successfully mitigates this bias, also improving evaluation performance (in terms of correlation of models with human scores) significantly.
title Likelihood-based Mitigation of Evaluation Bias in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15987