CriticAL: Critic Automation with Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Michael Y., Vajipey, Vivek, Goodman, Noah D., Fox, Emily B.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Li, Michael Y.
Vajipey, Vivek
Goodman, Noah D.
Fox, Emily B.
author_facet Li, Michael Y.
Vajipey, Vivek
Goodman, Noah D.
Fox, Emily B.
contents Understanding the world through models is a fundamental goal of scientific research. While large language model (LLM) based approaches show promise in automating scientific discovery, they often overlook the importance of criticizing scientific models. Criticizing models deepens scientific understanding and drives the development of more accurate models. Automating model criticism is difficult because it traditionally requires a human expert to define how to compare a model with data and evaluate if the discrepancies are significant--both rely heavily on understanding the modeling assumptions and domain. Although LLM-based critic approaches are appealing, they introduce new challenges: LLMs might hallucinate the critiques themselves. Motivated by this, we introduce CriticAL (Critic Automation with Language Models). CriticAL uses LLMs to generate summary statistics that capture discrepancies between model predictions and data, and applies hypothesis tests to evaluate their significance. We can view CriticAL as a verifier that validates models and their critiques by embedding them in a hypothesis testing framework. In experiments, we evaluate CriticAL across key quantitative and qualitative dimensions. In settings where we synthesize discrepancies between models and datasets, CriticAL reliably generates correct critiques without hallucinating incorrect ones. We show that both human and LLM judges consistently prefer CriticAL's critiques over alternative approaches in terms of transparency and actionability. Finally, we show that CriticAL's critiques enable an LLM scientist to improve upon human-designed models on real-world datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_06590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CriticAL: Critic Automation with Language Models
Li, Michael Y.
Vajipey, Vivek
Goodman, Noah D.
Fox, Emily B.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Understanding the world through models is a fundamental goal of scientific research. While large language model (LLM) based approaches show promise in automating scientific discovery, they often overlook the importance of criticizing scientific models. Criticizing models deepens scientific understanding and drives the development of more accurate models. Automating model criticism is difficult because it traditionally requires a human expert to define how to compare a model with data and evaluate if the discrepancies are significant--both rely heavily on understanding the modeling assumptions and domain. Although LLM-based critic approaches are appealing, they introduce new challenges: LLMs might hallucinate the critiques themselves. Motivated by this, we introduce CriticAL (Critic Automation with Language Models). CriticAL uses LLMs to generate summary statistics that capture discrepancies between model predictions and data, and applies hypothesis tests to evaluate their significance. We can view CriticAL as a verifier that validates models and their critiques by embedding them in a hypothesis testing framework. In experiments, we evaluate CriticAL across key quantitative and qualitative dimensions. In settings where we synthesize discrepancies between models and datasets, CriticAL reliably generates correct critiques without hallucinating incorrect ones. We show that both human and LLM judges consistently prefer CriticAL's critiques over alternative approaches in terms of transparency and actionability. Finally, we show that CriticAL's critiques enable an LLM scientist to improve upon human-designed models on real-world datasets.
title CriticAL: Critic Automation with Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06590