Selective Generation for Controllable Language Models

Trustworthiness of generative language models (GLMs) is crucial in their deployment to critical decision making systems. Hence, certified risk control methods such as selective prediction and conformal prediction have been applied to mitigating the hallucination problem in various supervised downstream tasks. However, the lack of appropriate correctness metric hinders applying such principled methods to language generation tasks. In this paper, we circumvent this problem by leveraging the concept of textual entailment to evaluate the correctness of the generated sequence, and propose two selective generation algorithms which control the false discovery rate with respect to the textual entailment relation (FDR-E) with a theoretical guarantee: $\texttt{SGen}^{\texttt{Sup}}$ and $\texttt{SGen}^{\texttt{Semi}}$. $\texttt{SGen}^{\texttt{Sup}}$, a direct modification of the selective prediction, is a supervised learning algorithm which exploits entailment-labeled data, annotated by humans. Since human annotation is costly, we further propose a semi-supervised version, $\texttt{SGen}^{\texttt{Semi}}$, which fully utilizes the unlabeled data by pseudo-labeling, leveraging an entailment set function learned via conformal prediction. Furthermore, $\texttt{SGen}^{\texttt{Semi}}$ enables to use more general class of selection functions, neuro-selection functions, and provides users with an optimal selection function class given multiple candidates. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the $\texttt{SGen}$ family in achieving a desired FDR-E level with comparable selection efficiency to those from baselines on both open and closed source GLMs. Code and datasets are provided at https://github.com/ml-postech/selective-generation.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer UCLF6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-11

Summary

This paper introduces Neuro-Selective Entailing-Generation (NSEGen), a novel approach to enhance the trustworthiness of generative language models. The method extends selective classification to language generation tasks, utilizing textual entailment to measure semantic correctness between generated and true answers. NSEGen employs a semi-supervised method that leverages both labeled and unlabeled data by learning an entailment set, addressing the challenge of expensive entailment labeling. The authors introduce neuro-selection functions to optimize feature selection for minimizing false discovery rate and provide theoretical guarantees on false discovery rate control. The approach aims to control the entailment-based false discovery rate while maximizing selection efficiency.

Strengths

- The paper introduces a new framework for improving GLM trustworthiness that addresses limitations of existing methods. This is particularly important because it tackles the metric misalignment issue in GLMs, where conventional metrics like exact match fail to capture semantic correctness. By introducing selective generation and leveraging textual entailment, the authors provide a more nuanced and accurate way to evaluate language model outputs. - The approach is supported by thorough theoretical analysis and guarantees. The authors provide a detailed proof for the correctness guarantee of their algorithm (Theorem 1) and establish conditions for achieving monotonicity in precision (Lemma 3).

Weaknesses

- The method introduces several new components and parameters, which may make it challenging to implement and tune. For instance, the algorithm involves learning an entailment set, designing neuro-selection functions, and tuning multiple parameters. This complexity could make it difficult for practitioners to adopt the method. - Experiments are conducted only on Natural Question with two models (GPT-3.5 and Alpaca-7B). While these experiments do demonstrate the method's effectiveness, they leave open questions about its generalizability. Especially if the method claims to adapt uncertainty learning methods to generation tasks. It would be valuable to see how the method performs on a wider range of language generation tasks (e.g., summarization, translation, or open-ended text generation and so on).

Questions

N/A

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

N/A

Reviewer KeFc8/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-12

Summary

The paper investigates the trustworthiness of generative language models in critical decision-making systems, identifying deficiencies in current uncertainty learning methods, such as selective classification and conformal prediction, which fail to address metric misalignment in GLMs. The authors propose an entailment-based false discovery rate by leveraging logical entailment to define the relationship between true and generated answers. They introduce a supervised selective generation approach using entailment labels to control the FDR and a semi-supervised method to mitigate the high cost of obtaining these labels. This method employs an entailment set for pseudo-labeling and neuro-selection functions to enhance data space learning, reducing FDR. The neuro-selective entailing-generation algorithm is theoretically validated, meeting the PAC guarantee on the desired FDR. NSeGen demonstrates improved efficiency and reliability in achieving a desired FDR level compared to baseline models, highlighting its practical applications.

Strengths

The work works to provide good grounding of both the problem and proposed path to the solution. With the proposed path, the authors work well to highlight the deficiencies both with current approaches, as well as their chosen approach and then incorporate fixes that make the deficiencies less of a problem. The work to do psuedo labelling and also deal with entailment is important as well as showing the theoretical guarantees.

Weaknesses

1. There is a bit of repetitiveness in the Experiment section when describing the GLMs and Datasets. 2. It should be made clear that your approach deals with the generation results from the underlying model. For example, when reading table 1 earlier I thought you were comparing Alpaca to your method, but later got it as you have different ways to deal with the selective generation. 3. It would be great to get a practical understanding of how much data would be needed to train a good enough selective algorithm. This is important especially in low resource scenarios (both language and application areas) as the space of application of where such an algorithm such as yours might be used is highly likely in places were there is not much data. So ablation studies on sizes of the training set would have been great.

Questions

See my weaknesses. esp. 3. It would be great to get a practical understanding of how much data would be needed to train a good enough selective algorithm. This is important especially in low resource scenarios (both language and application areas) as the space of application of where such an algorithm such as yours might be used is highly likely in places were there is not much data. So ablation

Rating

8

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

4

Contribution

4

Limitations

The work covers their limitations well and this was very appreciated. A practical guide for researchers might have been great in terms of knowing how much data is needed to help the psuedo labelling.

Reviewer abKP3/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

This work presents a method for selective generation from language models for question answering. Their approach functions as a secondary decision function on top of an existing language model, determining whether to accept the language model's generation or to abstain. Their method is approach is based on constructing an entailment set of correct answers to a given question. The entailment set is defined as all answers that imply or textually entail the ground truth answer. They then design their secondary decision function such that it satisfies bounds on the correctness of accepted, generated answers based on whether it is within the constructed entailment set, or the answer not being in the ground truth entailment set. The authors then demonstrate that their method satisfies correctness guarantees based on conformal prediction, and demonstrate the efficacy of using their entailment set approach to identifying correctness empircally through experiments on open-domain question answering (NaturalQuestions) and with two language models (Alapaca7b and GPT3.5)

Strengths

The goal of this work, selective generation for language models to prevent hallucinations and erroneous outputs is sounds and well motivated. This work provides theoretical guarantees on the efficacy of the selective generation approach, builds upon insights from prior works on the efficacy of using textual entailment to aid in calibrating QA predictions.

Weaknesses

Relying on single-directional textual entailment as a method for determining correctness of an answer is susceptible to accepting generations that produce that untrue fact or hallucinations in addition to the correct answer. [1] is a very relevant work (that was not cited) that similarly uses entailment to determine equivalence between two answers; however, in their work they rely on bi-directional entailment to ensure answer equivalence. The baselines used in this work lack clear descriptions, and are not in line with current simple and effective methods for selective generation and calibration of language models [1, 2, 3]. [2] and [3] both do not require additional entailment training data and [1] takes a related approach using entailment to determine answer equivalence among a set of generated answers. [1] also does not require domain-specific entailment data. [1] Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation Lorenz Kuhn, Yarin Gal, Sebastian Farquhar ICLR 2023 [2] Self-consistency improves chain of thought reasoning in language models. X. Wang, J. Wei, D. Schuurmans, Q. Le, E. Chi, S. Narang, A. Chowdhery, and D. Zhou. ICLR 2023 [3] Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know Saurav Kadavath, Tom Conerly, Amanda Askell, Tom Henighan, Dawn Drain, Ethan Perez, Nicholas Schiefer, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Nova DasSarma, Eli Tran-Johnson, Scott Johnston, Sheer El-Showk, Andy Jones, Nelson Elhage, Tristan Hume, Anna Chen, Yuntao Bai, Sam Bowman, Stanislav Fort, Deep Ganguli, Danny Hernandez, Josh Jacobson, Jackson Kernion, Shauna Kravec, Liane Lovitt, Kamal Ndousse, Catherine Olsson, Sam Ringer, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Nicholas Joseph, Ben Mann, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Jared Kaplan ArXiv 2022

Questions

The presentation of the experimental details could benefit from additional explanation. Clearly defining what the baselines are and how their implemented (not just the algorithms in the appendix) would greatly improve readability. This applies to the experimental results and metrics as well. Evaluations could be designed in a way that (1) more clearly describe each methods efficacy and performance in the end task (QA in this case) and (2) allow for direct comparison against other methods also designed for calibration and selective generation.

Rating

3

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

The authors address that they do not report statistical significance.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Dear Reviewer abKP, We again appreciate your constructive feedback to improve our submission. As the discussion period ends soon, we'd like to hear more about your opinion on our submission to address your concerns. Thanks! Best, Authors

Reviewer 7eme7/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-15

Summary

The paper looks at a selective generative language system, meaning one which can produce a I-Don't-Know label rather than an answer, and calibrating it such that some guarantees on the precision of the system can be made. The paper expands upon citation [1] on selective generation, to improve the efficiency by not requiring an exact match metric on the answer in order to be able to say whether it is correct or not. This is important for language generation tasks where there are endless possibly valid answers. It does this via the use of entailment measures, ie saying whether a candidate question+answer pair have positive/negative or neutral entailment. The paper reports theoretical analysis of when the proposed method can be learnt within given error margins, doing so under reasonable assumptions of the data being IID. This may not truly be the case for say actual question-answer datasets, but is a required assumption for the theoretical statements that are presented. The paper also presents empirical results on a question-answer dataset (Natural Questions), comparing against other selective generation methods with exact matching (rather than entailment), and with entailment sets (from labels or inferred). The proposed method which learns the selective threshold is shown to have the best false-discovery-rate (ie the inverse of precision on the generated answer).

Strengths

The requirement of having labels for answer correctness is clearly a large limiting factor in language generation tasks given the large number of possible correct answers. Relaxing this via entailment is therefore well motivated. Thorough theoretical analysis given, albeit under

Weaknesses

* Say more about what language problems this could and could not be applied to. The key appears to be in being able to have an accurate entailment function. For how many types of language-generation problems is such obtainable? * Some data on rates of IDK generation on the test set would be useful to see. * Minor suggestion: an algorithm box showing the steps for the whole proposed approach would be helpful for the reader. * The paper would benefit from an editor / proofreading. It doesn't impact understanding, but there are several small typos (lines 34, 69, 367 as some examples)

Questions

* In figure 2, are the SG-EM and SG-ES systems scoring 0? I'm not familiar with the prior literature, but with this paper being strongly influenced by [1] where SG-EM is from, it seems surprising these 2 baselines are so poor.

Rating

7

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

* The theoretical analysis relies on the IID assumption, which won't hold on real world language datasets. This is noted by the authors. * Not clear how many language problems this is applicable to.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-10

BTW, we have a formatting issue in our first answer. Our response starts from "Thanks for raising..." in the question quote. Please consider this when you read our response. Thanks!

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (spotlight)

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