Peering into the Mind of Language Models: An Approach for Attribution in Contextual Question Answering

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Main Authors: Phukan, Anirudh, Somasundaram, Shwetha, Saxena, Apoorv, Goswami, Koustava, Srinivasan, Balaji Vasan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Phukan, Anirudh
Somasundaram, Shwetha
Saxena, Apoorv
Goswami, Koustava
Srinivasan, Balaji Vasan
author_facet Phukan, Anirudh
Somasundaram, Shwetha
Saxena, Apoorv
Goswami, Koustava
Srinivasan, Balaji Vasan
contents With the enhancement in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI), contextual question answering has become extremely relevant. Attributing model generations to the input source document is essential to ensure trustworthiness and reliability. We observe that when large language models (LLMs) are used for contextual question answering, the output answer often consists of text copied verbatim from the input prompt which is linked together with "glue text" generated by the LLM. Motivated by this, we propose that LLMs have an inherent awareness from where the text was copied, likely captured in the hidden states of the LLM. We introduce a novel method for attribution in contextual question answering, leveraging the hidden state representations of LLMs. Our approach bypasses the need for extensive model retraining and retrieval model overhead, offering granular attributions and preserving the quality of generated answers. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method performs on par or better than GPT-4 at identifying verbatim copied segments in LLM generations and in attributing these segments to their source. Importantly, our method shows robust performance across various LLM architectures, highlighting its broad applicability. Additionally, we present Verifiability-granular, an attribution dataset which has token level annotations for LLM generations in the contextual question answering setup.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17980
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Peering into the Mind of Language Models: An Approach for Attribution in Contextual Question Answering
Phukan, Anirudh
Somasundaram, Shwetha
Saxena, Apoorv
Goswami, Koustava
Srinivasan, Balaji Vasan
Computation and Language
With the enhancement in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI), contextual question answering has become extremely relevant. Attributing model generations to the input source document is essential to ensure trustworthiness and reliability. We observe that when large language models (LLMs) are used for contextual question answering, the output answer often consists of text copied verbatim from the input prompt which is linked together with "glue text" generated by the LLM. Motivated by this, we propose that LLMs have an inherent awareness from where the text was copied, likely captured in the hidden states of the LLM. We introduce a novel method for attribution in contextual question answering, leveraging the hidden state representations of LLMs. Our approach bypasses the need for extensive model retraining and retrieval model overhead, offering granular attributions and preserving the quality of generated answers. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method performs on par or better than GPT-4 at identifying verbatim copied segments in LLM generations and in attributing these segments to their source. Importantly, our method shows robust performance across various LLM architectures, highlighting its broad applicability. Additionally, we present Verifiability-granular, an attribution dataset which has token level annotations for LLM generations in the contextual question answering setup.
title Peering into the Mind of Language Models: An Approach for Attribution in Contextual Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17980