Lost in Inference: Rediscovering the Role of Natural Language Inference for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Madaan, Lovish, Esiobu, David, Stenetorp, Pontus, Plank, Barbara, Hupkes, Dieuwke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Madaan, Lovish
Esiobu, David
Stenetorp, Pontus
Plank, Barbara
Hupkes, Dieuwke
author_facet Madaan, Lovish
Esiobu, David
Stenetorp, Pontus
Plank, Barbara
Hupkes, Dieuwke
contents In the recent past, a popular way of evaluating natural language understanding (NLU), was to consider a model's ability to perform natural language inference (NLI) tasks. In this paper, we investigate if NLI tasks, that are rarely used for LLM evaluation, can still be informative for evaluating LLMs. Focusing on five different NLI benchmarks across six models of different scales, we investigate if they are able to discriminate models of different size and quality and how their accuracies develop during training. Furthermore, we investigate the extent to which the softmax distributions of models align with human distributions in cases where statements are ambiguous or vague. Overall, our results paint a positive picture for the NLI tasks: we find that they are able to discriminate well between models at various stages of training, yet are not (all) saturated. Furthermore, we find that while the similarity of model distributions with human label distributions increases with scale, it is still much higher than the similarity between two populations of humans, making it a potentially interesting statistic to consider.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_14103
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lost in Inference: Rediscovering the Role of Natural Language Inference for Large Language Models
Madaan, Lovish
Esiobu, David
Stenetorp, Pontus
Plank, Barbara
Hupkes, Dieuwke
Computation and Language
In the recent past, a popular way of evaluating natural language understanding (NLU), was to consider a model's ability to perform natural language inference (NLI) tasks. In this paper, we investigate if NLI tasks, that are rarely used for LLM evaluation, can still be informative for evaluating LLMs. Focusing on five different NLI benchmarks across six models of different scales, we investigate if they are able to discriminate models of different size and quality and how their accuracies develop during training. Furthermore, we investigate the extent to which the softmax distributions of models align with human distributions in cases where statements are ambiguous or vague. Overall, our results paint a positive picture for the NLI tasks: we find that they are able to discriminate well between models at various stages of training, yet are not (all) saturated. Furthermore, we find that while the similarity of model distributions with human label distributions increases with scale, it is still much higher than the similarity between two populations of humans, making it a potentially interesting statistic to consider.
title Lost in Inference: Rediscovering the Role of Natural Language Inference for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14103