Layer Importance and Hallucination Analysis in Large Language Models via Enhanced Activation Variance-Sparsity

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Hauptverfasser: Song, Zichen, Huang, Sitan, Wu, Yuxin, Kang, Zhongfeng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Song, Zichen
Huang, Sitan
Wu, Yuxin
Kang, Zhongfeng
author_facet Song, Zichen
Huang, Sitan
Wu, Yuxin
Kang, Zhongfeng
contents Evaluating the importance of different layers in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for optimizing model performance and interpretability. This paper first explores layer importance using the Activation Variance-Sparsity Score (AVSS), which combines normalized activation variance and sparsity to quantify each layer's contribution to overall model performance. By ranking layers based on AVSS and pruning the least impactful 25\%, our experiments on tasks such as question answering, language modeling, and sentiment classification show that over 90\% of the original performance is retained, highlighting potential redundancies in LLM architectures. Building on AVSS, we propose an enhanced version tailored to assess hallucination propensity across layers (EAVSS). This improved approach introduces Hallucination-Specific Activation Variance (HSAV) and Hallucination-Specific Sparsity (HSS) metrics, allowing precise identification of hallucination-prone layers. By incorporating contrastive learning on these layers, we effectively mitigate hallucination generation, contributing to more robust and efficient LLMs(The maximum performance improvement is 12\%). Our results on the NQ, SciQ, TriviaQA, TruthfulQA, and WikiQA datasets demonstrate the efficacy of this method, offering a comprehensive framework for both layer importance evaluation and hallucination mitigation in LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_10069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Layer Importance and Hallucination Analysis in Large Language Models via Enhanced Activation Variance-Sparsity
Song, Zichen
Huang, Sitan
Wu, Yuxin
Kang, Zhongfeng
Computation and Language
Performance
Evaluating the importance of different layers in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for optimizing model performance and interpretability. This paper first explores layer importance using the Activation Variance-Sparsity Score (AVSS), which combines normalized activation variance and sparsity to quantify each layer's contribution to overall model performance. By ranking layers based on AVSS and pruning the least impactful 25\%, our experiments on tasks such as question answering, language modeling, and sentiment classification show that over 90\% of the original performance is retained, highlighting potential redundancies in LLM architectures. Building on AVSS, we propose an enhanced version tailored to assess hallucination propensity across layers (EAVSS). This improved approach introduces Hallucination-Specific Activation Variance (HSAV) and Hallucination-Specific Sparsity (HSS) metrics, allowing precise identification of hallucination-prone layers. By incorporating contrastive learning on these layers, we effectively mitigate hallucination generation, contributing to more robust and efficient LLMs(The maximum performance improvement is 12\%). Our results on the NQ, SciQ, TriviaQA, TruthfulQA, and WikiQA datasets demonstrate the efficacy of this method, offering a comprehensive framework for both layer importance evaluation and hallucination mitigation in LLMs.
title Layer Importance and Hallucination Analysis in Large Language Models via Enhanced Activation Variance-Sparsity
topic Computation and Language
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10069