DeCoRe: Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads to Mitigate Hallucinations

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gema, Aryo Pradipta, Jin, Chen, Abdulaal, Ahmed, Diethe, Tom, Teare, Philip, Alex, Beatrice, Minervini, Pasquale, Saseendran, Amrutha
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Gema, Aryo Pradipta
Jin, Chen
Abdulaal, Ahmed
Diethe, Tom
Teare, Philip
Alex, Beatrice
Minervini, Pasquale
Saseendran, Amrutha
author_facet Gema, Aryo Pradipta
Jin, Chen
Abdulaal, Ahmed
Diethe, Tom
Teare, Philip
Alex, Beatrice
Minervini, Pasquale
Saseendran, Amrutha
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) often hallucinate, producing unfaithful or factually incorrect outputs by misrepresenting the provided context or incorrectly recalling internal knowledge. Recent studies have identified specific attention heads within the Transformer architecture, known as retrieval heads, responsible for extracting relevant contextual information. We hypothesise that masking these retrieval heads can induce hallucinations and that contrasting the outputs of the base LLM and the masked LLM can reduce hallucinations. To this end, we propose Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads (DeCoRe), a novel training-free decoding strategy that amplifies information found in the context and model parameters. DeCoRe mitigates potentially hallucinated responses by dynamically contrasting the outputs of the base LLM and the masked LLM, using conditional entropy as a guide. Our extensive experiments confirm that DeCoRe significantly improves performance on tasks requiring high contextual faithfulness, such as summarisation (XSum by 18.6%), instruction following (MemoTrap by 10.9%), and open-book question answering (NQ-Open by 2.4% and NQ-Swap by 5.5%).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeCoRe: Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads to Mitigate Hallucinations
Gema, Aryo Pradipta
Jin, Chen
Abdulaal, Ahmed
Diethe, Tom
Teare, Philip
Alex, Beatrice
Minervini, Pasquale
Saseendran, Amrutha
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) often hallucinate, producing unfaithful or factually incorrect outputs by misrepresenting the provided context or incorrectly recalling internal knowledge. Recent studies have identified specific attention heads within the Transformer architecture, known as retrieval heads, responsible for extracting relevant contextual information. We hypothesise that masking these retrieval heads can induce hallucinations and that contrasting the outputs of the base LLM and the masked LLM can reduce hallucinations. To this end, we propose Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads (DeCoRe), a novel training-free decoding strategy that amplifies information found in the context and model parameters. DeCoRe mitigates potentially hallucinated responses by dynamically contrasting the outputs of the base LLM and the masked LLM, using conditional entropy as a guide. Our extensive experiments confirm that DeCoRe significantly improves performance on tasks requiring high contextual faithfulness, such as summarisation (XSum by 18.6%), instruction following (MemoTrap by 10.9%), and open-book question answering (NQ-Open by 2.4% and NQ-Swap by 5.5%).
title DeCoRe: Decoding by Contrasting Retrieval Heads to Mitigate Hallucinations
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18860