MAQA: Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs Regarding Data Uncertainty

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Yongjin, Yoo, Haneul, Lee, Hwaran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yang, Yongjin
Yoo, Haneul
Lee, Hwaran
author_facet Yang, Yongjin
Yoo, Haneul
Lee, Hwaran
contents Despite the massive advancements in large language models (LLMs), they still suffer from producing plausible but incorrect responses. To improve the reliability of LLMs, recent research has focused on uncertainty quantification to predict whether a response is correct or not. However, most uncertainty quantification methods have been evaluated on single-labeled questions, which removes data uncertainty: the irreducible randomness often present in user queries, which can arise from factors like multiple possible answers. This limitation may cause uncertainty quantification results to be unreliable in practical settings. In this paper, we investigate previous uncertainty quantification methods under the presence of data uncertainty. Our contributions are two-fold: 1) proposing a new Multi-Answer Question Answering dataset, MAQA, consisting of world knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks to evaluate uncertainty quantification regarding data uncertainty, and 2) assessing 5 uncertainty quantification methods of diverse white- and black-box LLMs. Our findings show that previous methods relatively struggle compared to single-answer settings, though this varies depending on the task. Moreover, we observe that entropy- and consistency-based methods effectively estimate model uncertainty, even in the presence of data uncertainty. We believe these observations will guide future work on uncertainty quantification in more realistic settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MAQA: Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs Regarding Data Uncertainty
Yang, Yongjin
Yoo, Haneul
Lee, Hwaran
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Despite the massive advancements in large language models (LLMs), they still suffer from producing plausible but incorrect responses. To improve the reliability of LLMs, recent research has focused on uncertainty quantification to predict whether a response is correct or not. However, most uncertainty quantification methods have been evaluated on single-labeled questions, which removes data uncertainty: the irreducible randomness often present in user queries, which can arise from factors like multiple possible answers. This limitation may cause uncertainty quantification results to be unreliable in practical settings. In this paper, we investigate previous uncertainty quantification methods under the presence of data uncertainty. Our contributions are two-fold: 1) proposing a new Multi-Answer Question Answering dataset, MAQA, consisting of world knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks to evaluate uncertainty quantification regarding data uncertainty, and 2) assessing 5 uncertainty quantification methods of diverse white- and black-box LLMs. Our findings show that previous methods relatively struggle compared to single-answer settings, though this varies depending on the task. Moreover, we observe that entropy- and consistency-based methods effectively estimate model uncertainty, even in the presence of data uncertainty. We believe these observations will guide future work on uncertainty quantification in more realistic settings.
title MAQA: Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs Regarding Data Uncertainty
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06816