Linguistic Calibration of Long-Form Generations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Band, Neil, Li, Xuechen, Ma, Tengyu, Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Band, Neil
Li, Xuechen
Ma, Tengyu
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
author_facet Band, Neil
Li, Xuechen
Ma, Tengyu
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
contents Language models (LMs) may lead their users to make suboptimal downstream decisions when they confidently hallucinate. This issue can be mitigated by having the LM verbally convey the probability that its claims are correct, but existing models cannot produce long-form text with calibrated confidence statements. Through the lens of decision-making, we define linguistic calibration for long-form generations: an LM is linguistically calibrated if its generations enable its users to make calibrated probabilistic predictions. This definition enables a training framework where a supervised finetuning step bootstraps an LM to emit long-form generations with confidence statements such as "I estimate a 30% chance of..." or "I am certain that...", followed by a reinforcement learning step which rewards generations that enable a user to provide calibrated answers to related questions. We linguistically calibrate Llama 2 7B and find in automated and human evaluations of long-form generations that it is significantly more calibrated than strong finetuned factuality baselines with comparable accuracy. These findings generalize under significant domain shifts to scientific and biomedical questions and to an entirely held-out person biography generation task. Our results demonstrate that long-form generations may be calibrated end-to-end by constructing an objective in the space of the predictions that users make in downstream decision-making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_00474
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Linguistic Calibration of Long-Form Generations
Band, Neil
Li, Xuechen
Ma, Tengyu
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Language models (LMs) may lead their users to make suboptimal downstream decisions when they confidently hallucinate. This issue can be mitigated by having the LM verbally convey the probability that its claims are correct, but existing models cannot produce long-form text with calibrated confidence statements. Through the lens of decision-making, we define linguistic calibration for long-form generations: an LM is linguistically calibrated if its generations enable its users to make calibrated probabilistic predictions. This definition enables a training framework where a supervised finetuning step bootstraps an LM to emit long-form generations with confidence statements such as "I estimate a 30% chance of..." or "I am certain that...", followed by a reinforcement learning step which rewards generations that enable a user to provide calibrated answers to related questions. We linguistically calibrate Llama 2 7B and find in automated and human evaluations of long-form generations that it is significantly more calibrated than strong finetuned factuality baselines with comparable accuracy. These findings generalize under significant domain shifts to scientific and biomedical questions and to an entirely held-out person biography generation task. Our results demonstrate that long-form generations may be calibrated end-to-end by constructing an objective in the space of the predictions that users make in downstream decision-making.
title Linguistic Calibration of Long-Form Generations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00474