RankAlign: A Ranking View of the Generator-Validator Gap in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Rodriguez, Juan Diego, Ding, Wenxuan, Erk, Katrin, Durrett, Greg
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914016743391232
author Rodriguez, Juan Diego
Ding, Wenxuan
Erk, Katrin
Durrett, Greg
author_facet Rodriguez, Juan Diego
Ding, Wenxuan
Erk, Katrin
Durrett, Greg
contents Although large language models (LLMs) have become more capable and accurate across many tasks, some fundamental sources of unreliability remain in their behavior. One key limitation is their inconsistency at reporting the same information when prompts are changed. In this paper, we consider the discrepancy between a model's generated answer and their own verification of that answer, the generator-validator gap. We define this gap in a more stringent way than prior work: we expect correlation of scores from a generator and a validator over the entire set of candidate answers, i.e., candidate completions that could possibly arise during ordinary language use without breaking Gricean norms. We show that according to this measure, a large gap exists in various settings, including question answering, lexical semantics tasks, and next-word prediction. We then propose RankAlign, a ranking-based training method, and show that it significantly closes the gap, surpassing all baseline methods. Moreover, this approach generalizes well to out-of-domain tasks and lexical items.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_11381
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RankAlign: A Ranking View of the Generator-Validator Gap in Large Language Models
Rodriguez, Juan Diego
Ding, Wenxuan
Erk, Katrin
Durrett, Greg
Computation and Language
Although large language models (LLMs) have become more capable and accurate across many tasks, some fundamental sources of unreliability remain in their behavior. One key limitation is their inconsistency at reporting the same information when prompts are changed. In this paper, we consider the discrepancy between a model's generated answer and their own verification of that answer, the generator-validator gap. We define this gap in a more stringent way than prior work: we expect correlation of scores from a generator and a validator over the entire set of candidate answers, i.e., candidate completions that could possibly arise during ordinary language use without breaking Gricean norms. We show that according to this measure, a large gap exists in various settings, including question answering, lexical semantics tasks, and next-word prediction. We then propose RankAlign, a ranking-based training method, and show that it significantly closes the gap, surpassing all baseline methods. Moreover, this approach generalizes well to out-of-domain tasks and lexical items.
title RankAlign: A Ranking View of the Generator-Validator Gap in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11381