Fictitious Synthetic Data Can Improve LLM Factuality via Prerequisite Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Yujian, Chang, Shiyu, Jaakkola, Tommi, Zhang, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Liu, Yujian
Chang, Shiyu
Jaakkola, Tommi
Zhang, Yang
author_facet Liu, Yujian
Chang, Shiyu
Jaakkola, Tommi
Zhang, Yang
contents Recent studies have identified one aggravating factor of LLM hallucinations as the knowledge inconsistency between pre-training and fine-tuning, where unfamiliar fine-tuning data mislead the LLM to fabricate plausible but wrong outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy called Prereq-Tune to address this knowledge inconsistency and reduce hallucinations. Fundamentally, Prereq-Tune disentangles the learning of skills and knowledge, so the model learns only the task skills without being impacted by the knowledge inconsistency. To achieve this, Prereq-Tune introduces an additional prerequisite learning stage to learn the necessary knowledge for SFT, allowing subsequent SFT to focus only on task skills. Prereq-Tune can also be combined with fictitious synthetic data to enhance the grounding of LLM outputs to their internal knowledge. Experiments show that Prereq-Tune outperforms existing baselines in improving LLM's factuality across short QA and long-form generation tasks. It also opens new possibilities for knowledge-controlled generation in LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Prereq_tune.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_19290
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fictitious Synthetic Data Can Improve LLM Factuality via Prerequisite Learning
Liu, Yujian
Chang, Shiyu
Jaakkola, Tommi
Zhang, Yang
Computation and Language
Recent studies have identified one aggravating factor of LLM hallucinations as the knowledge inconsistency between pre-training and fine-tuning, where unfamiliar fine-tuning data mislead the LLM to fabricate plausible but wrong outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy called Prereq-Tune to address this knowledge inconsistency and reduce hallucinations. Fundamentally, Prereq-Tune disentangles the learning of skills and knowledge, so the model learns only the task skills without being impacted by the knowledge inconsistency. To achieve this, Prereq-Tune introduces an additional prerequisite learning stage to learn the necessary knowledge for SFT, allowing subsequent SFT to focus only on task skills. Prereq-Tune can also be combined with fictitious synthetic data to enhance the grounding of LLM outputs to their internal knowledge. Experiments show that Prereq-Tune outperforms existing baselines in improving LLM's factuality across short QA and long-form generation tasks. It also opens new possibilities for knowledge-controlled generation in LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Prereq_tune.git.
title Fictitious Synthetic Data Can Improve LLM Factuality via Prerequisite Learning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19290