Improving Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models via Semantic Embeddings

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22685v1
• Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2024 04:41:46 GMT
• Title: Improving Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models via Semantic Embeddings
• Authors: Yashvir S. Grewal, Edwin V. Bonilla, Thang D. Bui,
• Abstract summary: Accurately quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their reliable deployment. Current state-of-the-art methods for measuring semantic uncertainty in LLMs rely on strict bidirectional entailment criteria. We propose a novel approach that leverages semantic embeddings to achieve smoother and more robust estimation of semantic uncertainty.
• Score: 11.33157177182775
• License:
• Abstract: Accurately quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their reliable deployment, especially in high-stakes applications. Current state-of-the-art methods for measuring semantic uncertainty in LLMs rely on strict bidirectional entailment criteria between multiple generated responses and also depend on sequence likelihoods. While effective, these approaches often overestimate uncertainty due to their sensitivity to minor wording differences, additional correct information, and non-important words in the sequence. We propose a novel approach that leverages semantic embeddings to achieve smoother and more robust estimation of semantic uncertainty in LLMs. By capturing semantic similarities without depending on sequence likelihoods, our method inherently reduces any biases introduced by irrelevant words in the answers. Furthermore, we introduce an amortised version of our approach by explicitly modelling semantics as latent variables in a joint probabilistic model. This allows for uncertainty estimation in the embedding space with a single forward pass, significantly reducing computational overhead compared to existing multi-pass methods. Experiments across multiple question-answering datasets and frontier LLMs demonstrate that our embedding-based methods provide more accurate and nuanced uncertainty quantification than traditional approaches.

Related papers

• Cycles of Thought: Measuring LLM Confidence through Stable Explanations [53.15438489398938]
  Large language models (LLMs) can reach and even surpass human-level accuracy on a variety of benchmarks, but their overconfidence in incorrect responses is still a well-documented failure mode. We propose a framework for measuring an LLM's uncertainty with respect to the distribution of generated explanations for an answer.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-05T16:35:30Z)
• Kernel Language Entropy: Fine-grained Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs from Semantic Similarities [79.9629927171974]
  Uncertainty in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for applications where safety and reliability are important. We propose Kernel Language Entropy (KLE), a novel method for uncertainty estimation in white- and black-box LLMs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-30T12:42:05Z)
• Embedding Trajectory for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Mathematical Reasoning [50.84938730450622]
  We propose a trajectory-based method TV score, which uses trajectory volatility for OOD detection in mathematical reasoning. Our method outperforms all traditional algorithms on GLMs under mathematical reasoning scenarios. Our method can be extended to more applications with high-density features in output spaces, such as multiple-choice questions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-22T22:22:25Z)
• Semantic Density: Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models through Confidence Measurement in Semantic Space [14.715989394285238]
  Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) do not have an inherent functionality to provide the users with an uncertainty/confidence metric for each response it generates. A new framework is proposed in this paper to address these issues. Semantic density extracts uncertainty/confidence information for each response from a probability distribution perspective in semantic space.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-22T17:13:49Z)
• Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models [52.891205009620364]
  In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) We propose a novel formulation and corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-15T18:46:24Z)
• Combining Confidence Elicitation and Sample-based Methods for Uncertainty Quantification in Misinformation Mitigation [6.929834518749884]
  Large Language Models have emerged as prime candidates to tackle misinformation mitigation. Existing approaches struggle with hallucinations and overconfident predictions. We propose an uncertainty quantification framework that leverages both direct confidence elicitation and sampled-based consistency methods.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-13T16:36:58Z)
• One step closer to unbiased aleatoric uncertainty estimation [71.55174353766289]
  We propose a new estimation method by actively de-noising the observed data. By conducting a broad range of experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed approach provides a much closer approximation to the actual data uncertainty than the standard method.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-16T14:59:11Z)
• Decomposing Uncertainty for Large Language Models through Input Clarification Ensembling [69.83976050879318]
  In large language models (LLMs), identifying sources of uncertainty is an important step toward improving reliability, trustworthiness, and interpretability. In this paper, we introduce an uncertainty decomposition framework for LLMs, called input clarification ensembling. Our approach generates a set of clarifications for the input, feeds them into an LLM, and ensembles the corresponding predictions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-15T05:58:35Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.