Groundedness in Retrieval-augmented Long-form Generation: An Empirical Study

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Auteur principal: Stolfo, Alessandro
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Stolfo, Alessandro
author_facet Stolfo, Alessandro
contents We present an empirical study of groundedness in long-form question answering (LFQA) by retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs). In particular, we evaluate whether every generated sentence is grounded in the retrieved documents or the model's pre-training data. Across 3 datasets and 4 model families, our findings reveal that a significant fraction of generated sentences are consistently ungrounded, even when those sentences contain correct ground-truth answers. Additionally, we examine the impacts of factors such as model size, decoding strategy, and instruction tuning on groundedness. Our results show that while larger models tend to ground their outputs more effectively, a significant portion of correct answers remains compromised by hallucinations. This study provides novel insights into the groundedness challenges in LFQA and underscores the necessity for more robust mechanisms in LLMs to mitigate the generation of ungrounded content.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_07060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Groundedness in Retrieval-augmented Long-form Generation: An Empirical Study
Stolfo, Alessandro
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
We present an empirical study of groundedness in long-form question answering (LFQA) by retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs). In particular, we evaluate whether every generated sentence is grounded in the retrieved documents or the model's pre-training data. Across 3 datasets and 4 model families, our findings reveal that a significant fraction of generated sentences are consistently ungrounded, even when those sentences contain correct ground-truth answers. Additionally, we examine the impacts of factors such as model size, decoding strategy, and instruction tuning on groundedness. Our results show that while larger models tend to ground their outputs more effectively, a significant portion of correct answers remains compromised by hallucinations. This study provides novel insights into the groundedness challenges in LFQA and underscores the necessity for more robust mechanisms in LLMs to mitigate the generation of ungrounded content.
title Groundedness in Retrieval-augmented Long-form Generation: An Empirical Study
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07060