Teaching Large Language Models to Express Knowledge Boundary from Their Own Signals

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Lida, Liang, Zujie, Wang, Xintao, Liang, Jiaqing, Xiao, Yanghua, Wei, Feng, Chen, Jinglei, Hao, Zhenghong, Han, Bing, Wang, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chen, Lida
Liang, Zujie
Wang, Xintao
Liang, Jiaqing
Xiao, Yanghua
Wei, Feng
Chen, Jinglei
Hao, Zhenghong
Han, Bing
Wang, Wei
author_facet Chen, Lida
Liang, Zujie
Wang, Xintao
Liang, Jiaqing
Xiao, Yanghua
Wei, Feng
Chen, Jinglei
Hao, Zhenghong
Han, Bing
Wang, Wei
contents Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success, but their occasional content fabrication, or hallucination, limits their practical application. Hallucination arises because LLMs struggle to admit ignorance due to inadequate training on knowledge boundaries. We call it a limitation of LLMs that they can not accurately express their knowledge boundary, answering questions they know while admitting ignorance to questions they do not know. In this paper, we aim to teach LLMs to recognize and express their knowledge boundary, so they can reduce hallucinations caused by fabricating when they do not know. We propose CoKE, which first probes LLMs' knowledge boundary via internal confidence given a set of questions, and then leverages the probing results to elicit the expression of the knowledge boundary. Extensive experiments show CoKE helps LLMs express knowledge boundaries, answering known questions while declining unknown ones, significantly improving in-domain and out-of-domain performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_10881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Teaching Large Language Models to Express Knowledge Boundary from Their Own Signals
Chen, Lida
Liang, Zujie
Wang, Xintao
Liang, Jiaqing
Xiao, Yanghua
Wei, Feng
Chen, Jinglei
Hao, Zhenghong
Han, Bing
Wang, Wei
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success, but their occasional content fabrication, or hallucination, limits their practical application. Hallucination arises because LLMs struggle to admit ignorance due to inadequate training on knowledge boundaries. We call it a limitation of LLMs that they can not accurately express their knowledge boundary, answering questions they know while admitting ignorance to questions they do not know. In this paper, we aim to teach LLMs to recognize and express their knowledge boundary, so they can reduce hallucinations caused by fabricating when they do not know. We propose CoKE, which first probes LLMs' knowledge boundary via internal confidence given a set of questions, and then leverages the probing results to elicit the expression of the knowledge boundary. Extensive experiments show CoKE helps LLMs express knowledge boundaries, answering known questions while declining unknown ones, significantly improving in-domain and out-of-domain performance.
title Teaching Large Language Models to Express Knowledge Boundary from Their Own Signals
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10881