Exploring the Knowledge Mismatch Hypothesis: Hallucination Propensity in Small Models Fine-tuned on Data from Larger Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wee, Phil, Baghdadi, Riyadh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wee, Phil
Baghdadi, Riyadh
author_facet Wee, Phil
Baghdadi, Riyadh
contents Recently, there has been an explosion of large language models created through fine-tuning with data from larger models. These small models able to produce outputs that appear qualitatively similar to significantly larger models. However, one of the key limitations that have been observed with these models is their propensity to hallucinate significantly more often than larger models. In particular, they have been observed to generate coherent outputs that involve factually incorrect information and spread misinformation, toxicity, and stereotypes. There are many potential causes of hallucination, of which, one hypothesis is that fine-tuning a model on data produced by a larger model leads to a knowledge mismatch which contributes to hallucination. In particular, it is hypothesized that there is a mismatch between the knowledge that is fed to the model to fine-tune it and the knowledge that is already present in the graph. Fine-tuning the model on data that has such mismatch could contribute to an increased propensity to hallucinate. We show that on an unseen test set, a smaller model fine-tuned on data generated from a larger model produced more wrong answers when compared to models fine-tuned on data created by the small model, which confirms the hypothesis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00878
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Knowledge Mismatch Hypothesis: Hallucination Propensity in Small Models Fine-tuned on Data from Larger Models
Wee, Phil
Baghdadi, Riyadh
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, there has been an explosion of large language models created through fine-tuning with data from larger models. These small models able to produce outputs that appear qualitatively similar to significantly larger models. However, one of the key limitations that have been observed with these models is their propensity to hallucinate significantly more often than larger models. In particular, they have been observed to generate coherent outputs that involve factually incorrect information and spread misinformation, toxicity, and stereotypes. There are many potential causes of hallucination, of which, one hypothesis is that fine-tuning a model on data produced by a larger model leads to a knowledge mismatch which contributes to hallucination. In particular, it is hypothesized that there is a mismatch between the knowledge that is fed to the model to fine-tune it and the knowledge that is already present in the graph. Fine-tuning the model on data that has such mismatch could contribute to an increased propensity to hallucinate. We show that on an unseen test set, a smaller model fine-tuned on data generated from a larger model produced more wrong answers when compared to models fine-tuned on data created by the small model, which confirms the hypothesis.
title Exploring the Knowledge Mismatch Hypothesis: Hallucination Propensity in Small Models Fine-tuned on Data from Larger Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00878