AcTracer: Active Testing of Large Language Model via Multi-Stage Sampling

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huang, Yuheng, Song, Jiayang, Hu, Qiang, Juefei-Xu, Felix, Ma, Lei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Huang, Yuheng
Song, Jiayang
Hu, Qiang
Juefei-Xu, Felix
Ma, Lei
author_facet Huang, Yuheng
Song, Jiayang
Hu, Qiang
Juefei-Xu, Felix
Ma, Lei
contents Performance evaluation plays a crucial role in the development life cycle of large language models (LLMs). It estimates the model's capability, elucidates behavior characteristics, and facilitates the identification of potential issues and limitations, thereby guiding further improvement. Given that LLMs' diverse task-handling abilities stem from large volumes of training data, a comprehensive evaluation also necessitates abundant, well-annotated, and representative test data to assess LLM performance across various downstream tasks. However, the demand for high-quality test data often entails substantial time, computational resources, and manual efforts, sometimes causing the evaluation to be inefficient or impractical. To address these challenges, researchers propose active testing, which estimates the overall performance by selecting a subset of test data. Nevertheless, the existing active testing methods tend to be inefficient, even inapplicable, given the unique new challenges of LLMs (e.g., diverse task types, increased model complexity, and unavailability of training data). To mitigate such limitations and expedite the development cycle of LLMs, in this work, we introduce AcTracer, an active testing framework tailored for LLMs that strategically selects a small subset of test data to achieve a more accurate performance estimation for LLMs. AcTracer utilizes both internal and external information from LLMs to guide the test sampling process, reducing variance through a multi-stage pool-based active selection. Our experiment results demonstrate that AcTracer achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods across various tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_03573
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AcTracer: Active Testing of Large Language Model via Multi-Stage Sampling
Huang, Yuheng
Song, Jiayang
Hu, Qiang
Juefei-Xu, Felix
Ma, Lei
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
D.2.5; I.2.7
Performance evaluation plays a crucial role in the development life cycle of large language models (LLMs). It estimates the model's capability, elucidates behavior characteristics, and facilitates the identification of potential issues and limitations, thereby guiding further improvement. Given that LLMs' diverse task-handling abilities stem from large volumes of training data, a comprehensive evaluation also necessitates abundant, well-annotated, and representative test data to assess LLM performance across various downstream tasks. However, the demand for high-quality test data often entails substantial time, computational resources, and manual efforts, sometimes causing the evaluation to be inefficient or impractical. To address these challenges, researchers propose active testing, which estimates the overall performance by selecting a subset of test data. Nevertheless, the existing active testing methods tend to be inefficient, even inapplicable, given the unique new challenges of LLMs (e.g., diverse task types, increased model complexity, and unavailability of training data). To mitigate such limitations and expedite the development cycle of LLMs, in this work, we introduce AcTracer, an active testing framework tailored for LLMs that strategically selects a small subset of test data to achieve a more accurate performance estimation for LLMs. AcTracer utilizes both internal and external information from LLMs to guide the test sampling process, reducing variance through a multi-stage pool-based active selection. Our experiment results demonstrate that AcTracer achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods across various tasks.
title AcTracer: Active Testing of Large Language Model via Multi-Stage Sampling
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
D.2.5; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03573