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Main Authors: Li, Yingjie, Luo, Yun, Xie, Xiaotian, Zhang, Yue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18764
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author Li, Yingjie
Luo, Yun
Xie, Xiaotian
Zhang, Yue
author_facet Li, Yingjie
Luo, Yun
Xie, Xiaotian
Zhang, Yue
contents Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive zero-shot performance on inference tasks. However, LLMs may suffer from spurious correlations between input texts and output labels, which limits LLMs' ability to reason based purely on general language understanding. In other words, LLMs may make predictions primarily based on premise or hypothesis, rather than both components. To address this problem that may lead to unexpected performance degradation, we propose task calibration (TC), a zero-shot and inference-only calibration method inspired by mutual information which recovers LLM performance through task reformulation. TC encourages LLMs to reason based on both premise and hypothesis, while mitigating the models' over-reliance on individual premise or hypothesis for inference. Experimental results show that TC achieves a substantial improvement on 13 inference tasks in the zero-shot setup. We further validate the effectiveness of TC in few-shot setups and various natural language understanding tasks. Further analysis indicates that TC is also robust to prompt templates and has the potential to be integrated with other calibration methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Task Calibration: Calibrating Large Language Models on Inference Tasks
Li, Yingjie
Luo, Yun
Xie, Xiaotian
Zhang, Yue
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive zero-shot performance on inference tasks. However, LLMs may suffer from spurious correlations between input texts and output labels, which limits LLMs' ability to reason based purely on general language understanding. In other words, LLMs may make predictions primarily based on premise or hypothesis, rather than both components. To address this problem that may lead to unexpected performance degradation, we propose task calibration (TC), a zero-shot and inference-only calibration method inspired by mutual information which recovers LLM performance through task reformulation. TC encourages LLMs to reason based on both premise and hypothesis, while mitigating the models' over-reliance on individual premise or hypothesis for inference. Experimental results show that TC achieves a substantial improvement on 13 inference tasks in the zero-shot setup. We further validate the effectiveness of TC in few-shot setups and various natural language understanding tasks. Further analysis indicates that TC is also robust to prompt templates and has the potential to be integrated with other calibration methods.
title Task Calibration: Calibrating Large Language Models on Inference Tasks
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18764