Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kossen, Jannik, Han, Jiatong, Razzak, Muhammed, Schut, Lisa, Malik, Shreshth, Gal, Yarin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Kossen, Jannik
Han, Jiatong
Razzak, Muhammed
Schut, Lisa
Malik, Shreshth
Gal, Yarin
author_facet Kossen, Jannik
Han, Jiatong
Razzak, Muhammed
Schut, Lisa
Malik, Shreshth
Gal, Yarin
contents We propose semantic entropy probes (SEPs), a cheap and reliable method for uncertainty quantification in Large Language Models (LLMs). Hallucinations, which are plausible-sounding but factually incorrect and arbitrary model generations, present a major challenge to the practical adoption of LLMs. Recent work by Farquhar et al. (2024) proposes semantic entropy (SE), which can detect hallucinations by estimating uncertainty in the space semantic meaning for a set of model generations. However, the 5-to-10-fold increase in computation cost associated with SE computation hinders practical adoption. To address this, we propose SEPs, which directly approximate SE from the hidden states of a single generation. SEPs are simple to train and do not require sampling multiple model generations at test time, reducing the overhead of semantic uncertainty quantification to almost zero. We show that SEPs retain high performance for hallucination detection and generalize better to out-of-distribution data than previous probing methods that directly predict model accuracy. Our results across models and tasks suggest that model hidden states capture SE, and our ablation studies give further insights into the token positions and model layers for which this is the case.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_15927
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs
Kossen, Jannik
Han, Jiatong
Razzak, Muhammed
Schut, Lisa
Malik, Shreshth
Gal, Yarin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
We propose semantic entropy probes (SEPs), a cheap and reliable method for uncertainty quantification in Large Language Models (LLMs). Hallucinations, which are plausible-sounding but factually incorrect and arbitrary model generations, present a major challenge to the practical adoption of LLMs. Recent work by Farquhar et al. (2024) proposes semantic entropy (SE), which can detect hallucinations by estimating uncertainty in the space semantic meaning for a set of model generations. However, the 5-to-10-fold increase in computation cost associated with SE computation hinders practical adoption. To address this, we propose SEPs, which directly approximate SE from the hidden states of a single generation. SEPs are simple to train and do not require sampling multiple model generations at test time, reducing the overhead of semantic uncertainty quantification to almost zero. We show that SEPs retain high performance for hallucination detection and generalize better to out-of-distribution data than previous probing methods that directly predict model accuracy. Our results across models and tasks suggest that model hidden states capture SE, and our ablation studies give further insights into the token positions and model layers for which this is the case.
title Semantic Entropy Probes: Robust and Cheap Hallucination Detection in LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15927