Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lin, Qinhong, Zhou, Linna, Yang, Zhongliang, Cai, Yuang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Lin, Qinhong
Zhou, Linna
Yang, Zhongliang
Cai, Yuang
author_facet Lin, Qinhong
Zhou, Linna
Yang, Zhongliang
Cai, Yuang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) display formidable capabilities in generative tasks but also pose potential risks due to their tendency to generate hallucinatory responses. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), the evaluation of model output reliability, is crucial for ensuring the safety and robustness of AI systems. Recent studies have concentrated on model uncertainty by analyzing the relationship between output entropy under various sampling conditions and the corresponding labels. However, these methods primarily focus on measuring model entropy with precision to capture response characteristics, often neglecting the uncertainties associated with greedy decoding results-the sources of model labels, which can lead to biased classification outcomes. In this paper, we explore the biases introduced by greedy decoding and propose a label-confidence-aware (LCA) uncertainty estimation based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence bridging between samples and label source, thus enhancing the reliability and stability of uncertainty assessments. Our empirical evaluations across a range of popular LLMs and NLP datasets reveal that different label sources can indeed affect classification, and that our approach can effectively capture differences in sampling results and label sources, demonstrating more effective uncertainty estimation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_07255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation
Lin, Qinhong
Zhou, Linna
Yang, Zhongliang
Cai, Yuang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) display formidable capabilities in generative tasks but also pose potential risks due to their tendency to generate hallucinatory responses. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), the evaluation of model output reliability, is crucial for ensuring the safety and robustness of AI systems. Recent studies have concentrated on model uncertainty by analyzing the relationship between output entropy under various sampling conditions and the corresponding labels. However, these methods primarily focus on measuring model entropy with precision to capture response characteristics, often neglecting the uncertainties associated with greedy decoding results-the sources of model labels, which can lead to biased classification outcomes. In this paper, we explore the biases introduced by greedy decoding and propose a label-confidence-aware (LCA) uncertainty estimation based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence bridging between samples and label source, thus enhancing the reliability and stability of uncertainty assessments. Our empirical evaluations across a range of popular LLMs and NLP datasets reveal that different label sources can indeed affect classification, and that our approach can effectively capture differences in sampling results and label sources, demonstrating more effective uncertainty estimation.
title Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07255