Are You Sure? Challenging LLMs Leads to Performance Drops in The FlipFlop Experiment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08596v2
• Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2024 18:15:47 GMT
• Title: Are You Sure? Challenging LLMs Leads to Performance Drops in The FlipFlop Experiment
• Authors: Philippe Laban and Lidiya Murakhovs'ka and Caiming Xiong and Chien-Sheng Wu
• Abstract summary: We propose the FlipFlop experiment to study the multi-turn behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) We show that models flip their answers on average 46% of the time and that all models see a deterioration of accuracy between their first and final prediction, with an average drop of 17% (the FlipFlop effect) We conduct finetuning experiments on an open-source LLM and find that finetuning on synthetically created data can mitigate - reducing performance deterioration by 60% - but not resolve sycophantic behavior entirely.
• Score: 82.60594940370919
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically allows models to refine and improve their answers, yet systematic analysis of the multi-turn behavior of LLMs remains limited. In this paper, we propose the FlipFlop experiment: in the first round of the conversation, an LLM completes a classification task. In a second round, the LLM is challenged with a follow-up phrase like "Are you sure?", offering an opportunity for the model to reflect on its initial answer, and decide whether to confirm or flip its answer. A systematic study of ten LLMs on seven classification tasks reveals that models flip their answers on average 46% of the time and that all models see a deterioration of accuracy between their first and final prediction, with an average drop of 17% (the FlipFlop effect). We conduct finetuning experiments on an open-source LLM and find that finetuning on synthetically created data can mitigate - reducing performance deterioration by 60% - but not resolve sycophantic behavior entirely. The FlipFlop experiment illustrates the universality of sycophantic behavior in LLMs and provides a robust framework to analyze model behavior and evaluate future models.

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