Do Large Language Models Perform the Way People Expect? Measuring the Human Generalization Function

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vafa, Keyon, Rambachan, Ashesh, Mullainathan, Sendhil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909215534088192
author Vafa, Keyon
Rambachan, Ashesh
Mullainathan, Sendhil
author_facet Vafa, Keyon
Rambachan, Ashesh
Mullainathan, Sendhil
contents What makes large language models (LLMs) impressive is also what makes them hard to evaluate: their diversity of uses. To evaluate these models, we must understand the purposes they will be used for. We consider a setting where these deployment decisions are made by people, and in particular, people's beliefs about where an LLM will perform well. We model such beliefs as the consequence of a human generalization function: having seen what an LLM gets right or wrong, people generalize to where else it might succeed. We collect a dataset of 19K examples of how humans make generalizations across 79 tasks from the MMLU and BIG-Bench benchmarks. We show that the human generalization function can be predicted using NLP methods: people have consistent structured ways to generalize. We then evaluate LLM alignment with the human generalization function. Our results show that -- especially for cases where the cost of mistakes is high -- more capable models (e.g. GPT-4) can do worse on the instances people choose to use them for, exactly because they are not aligned with the human generalization function.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do Large Language Models Perform the Way People Expect? Measuring the Human Generalization Function
Vafa, Keyon
Rambachan, Ashesh
Mullainathan, Sendhil
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
What makes large language models (LLMs) impressive is also what makes them hard to evaluate: their diversity of uses. To evaluate these models, we must understand the purposes they will be used for. We consider a setting where these deployment decisions are made by people, and in particular, people's beliefs about where an LLM will perform well. We model such beliefs as the consequence of a human generalization function: having seen what an LLM gets right or wrong, people generalize to where else it might succeed. We collect a dataset of 19K examples of how humans make generalizations across 79 tasks from the MMLU and BIG-Bench benchmarks. We show that the human generalization function can be predicted using NLP methods: people have consistent structured ways to generalize. We then evaluate LLM alignment with the human generalization function. Our results show that -- especially for cases where the cost of mistakes is high -- more capable models (e.g. GPT-4) can do worse on the instances people choose to use them for, exactly because they are not aligned with the human generalization function.
title Do Large Language Models Perform the Way People Expect? Measuring the Human Generalization Function
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01382