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Hauptverfasser: Chen, Catherine Yu-Chi, Shen, Jingyan, Deng, Zhun, Lei, Lihua
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20285
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author Chen, Catherine Yu-Chi
Shen, Jingyan
Deng, Zhun
Lei, Lihua
author_facet Chen, Catherine Yu-Chi
Shen, Jingyan
Deng, Zhun
Lei, Lihua
contents Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have led to their widespread usage for various tasks. The prevalence of LLMs in society implores the assurance on the reliability of their performance. In particular, risk-sensitive applications demand meticulous attention to unexpectedly poor outcomes, i.e., tail events, for instance, toxic answers, humiliating language, and offensive outputs. Due to the costly nature of acquiring human annotations, general-purpose scoring models have been created to automate the process of quantifying these tail events. This phenomenon introduces potential human-machine misalignment between the respective scoring mechanisms. In this work, we present a lightweight calibration framework for blackbox models that ensures the alignment of humans and machines with provable guarantees. Our framework provides a rigorous approach to controlling any distortion risk measure that is characterized by a weighted average of quantiles of the loss incurred by the LLM with high confidence. The theoretical foundation of our method relies on the connection between conformal risk control and a traditional family of statistics, i.e., L-statistics. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we conduct comprehensive experiments that address the issue of human-machine misalignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20285
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conformal Tail Risk Control for Large Language Model Alignment
Chen, Catherine Yu-Chi
Shen, Jingyan
Deng, Zhun
Lei, Lihua
Machine Learning
Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have led to their widespread usage for various tasks. The prevalence of LLMs in society implores the assurance on the reliability of their performance. In particular, risk-sensitive applications demand meticulous attention to unexpectedly poor outcomes, i.e., tail events, for instance, toxic answers, humiliating language, and offensive outputs. Due to the costly nature of acquiring human annotations, general-purpose scoring models have been created to automate the process of quantifying these tail events. This phenomenon introduces potential human-machine misalignment between the respective scoring mechanisms. In this work, we present a lightweight calibration framework for blackbox models that ensures the alignment of humans and machines with provable guarantees. Our framework provides a rigorous approach to controlling any distortion risk measure that is characterized by a weighted average of quantiles of the loss incurred by the LLM with high confidence. The theoretical foundation of our method relies on the connection between conformal risk control and a traditional family of statistics, i.e., L-statistics. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we conduct comprehensive experiments that address the issue of human-machine misalignment.
title Conformal Tail Risk Control for Large Language Model Alignment
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20285