Towards a Holistic Evaluation of LLMs on Factual Knowledge Recall

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Hauptverfasser: Yuan, Jiaqing, Pan, Lin, Hang, Chung-Wei, Guo, Jiang, Jiang, Jiarong, Min, Bonan, Ng, Patrick, Wang, Zhiguo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Yuan, Jiaqing
Pan, Lin
Hang, Chung-Wei
Guo, Jiang
Jiang, Jiarong
Min, Bonan
Ng, Patrick
Wang, Zhiguo
author_facet Yuan, Jiaqing
Pan, Lin
Hang, Chung-Wei
Guo, Jiang
Jiang, Jiarong
Min, Bonan
Ng, Patrick
Wang, Zhiguo
contents Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks, and are being rapidly adopted in a wide range of use cases. It is therefore of vital importance to holistically evaluate the factuality of their generated outputs, as hallucinations remain a challenging issue. In this work, we focus on assessing LLMs' ability to recall factual knowledge learned from pretraining, and the factors that affect this ability. To that end, we construct FACT-BENCH, a representative benchmark covering 20 domains, 134 property types, 3 answer types, and different knowledge popularity levels. We benchmark 31 models from 10 model families and provide a holistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. We observe that instruction-tuning hurts knowledge recall, as pretraining-only models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned counterparts, and positive effects of model scaling, as larger models outperform smaller ones for all model families. However, the best performance from GPT-4 still represents a large gap with the upper-bound. We additionally study the role of in-context exemplars using counterfactual demonstrations, which lead to significant degradation of factual knowledge recall for large models. By further decoupling model known and unknown knowledge, we find the degradation is attributed to exemplars that contradict a model's known knowledge, as well as the number of such exemplars. Lastly, we fine-tune LLaMA-7B in different settings of known and unknown knowledge. In particular, fine-tuning on a model's known knowledge is beneficial, and consistently outperforms fine-tuning on unknown and mixed knowledge. We will make our benchmark publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_16164
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Holistic Evaluation of LLMs on Factual Knowledge Recall
Yuan, Jiaqing
Pan, Lin
Hang, Chung-Wei
Guo, Jiang
Jiang, Jiarong
Min, Bonan
Ng, Patrick
Wang, Zhiguo
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks, and are being rapidly adopted in a wide range of use cases. It is therefore of vital importance to holistically evaluate the factuality of their generated outputs, as hallucinations remain a challenging issue. In this work, we focus on assessing LLMs' ability to recall factual knowledge learned from pretraining, and the factors that affect this ability. To that end, we construct FACT-BENCH, a representative benchmark covering 20 domains, 134 property types, 3 answer types, and different knowledge popularity levels. We benchmark 31 models from 10 model families and provide a holistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. We observe that instruction-tuning hurts knowledge recall, as pretraining-only models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned counterparts, and positive effects of model scaling, as larger models outperform smaller ones for all model families. However, the best performance from GPT-4 still represents a large gap with the upper-bound. We additionally study the role of in-context exemplars using counterfactual demonstrations, which lead to significant degradation of factual knowledge recall for large models. By further decoupling model known and unknown knowledge, we find the degradation is attributed to exemplars that contradict a model's known knowledge, as well as the number of such exemplars. Lastly, we fine-tune LLaMA-7B in different settings of known and unknown knowledge. In particular, fine-tuning on a model's known knowledge is beneficial, and consistently outperforms fine-tuning on unknown and mixed knowledge. We will make our benchmark publicly available.
title Towards a Holistic Evaluation of LLMs on Factual Knowledge Recall
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16164