IQA-EVAL: Automatic Evaluation of Human-Model Interactive Question Answering

To evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for question answering (QA), traditional methods typically focus on assessing single-turn responses to given questions. However, this approach doesn't capture the dynamic nature of human-AI interactions, where humans actively seek information through conversation. Recent works in human-computer interaction (HCI) have employed human evaluators to conduct interactions and evaluations, but they are often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to scale. We introduce an automatic evaluation framework IQA-EVAL to achieve Interactive Question Answering Evaluations, more specifically, we introduce a LLM-based Evaluation Agent (LEA) that can: (1) simulate human behaviors to generate interactions with IQA models; (2) automatically evaluate the generated interactions. Moreover, we propose assigning personas to LEAs to better simulate groups of real human evaluators. We show that: (1) our evaluation framework with GPT-4 (or Claude) as the backbone model achieves a high correlation with human evaluations on the IQA task; (2) assigning personas to LEA to better represent the crowd further significantly improves correlations. Finally, we use our automatic metric to evaluate five recent representative LLMs with over 1000 questions from complex and ambiguous question answering tasks, which comes with a substantial cost of $5k if evaluated by humans.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer RXxM5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-07

Summary

This paper proposes an automated evaluation framework for Interactive Question Answering tasks based on LLM-based agent. The authors utilize LLMs to simulate the interaction between human and IQA models and use them to evaluate the interactions automatically. Additionally, they assign predefined personas to LLMs to better simulate the interaction characteristics of different groups. Their evaluation framework achieves a stronger correlation with human evaluations and eliminates the high costs of manual evaluation.

Strengths

The strength of this paper is that it highlighted the importance of interaction in evaluation process for QA tasks and provided a solution for this problem, showing new insights into the evaluation for QA tasks.

Weaknesses

The weakness of this paper is the lack of technical contributions and novelty, and its experimental analysis is not strong enough. They only used prompts to implement their methods, without any prompt engineering approach. Furthermore, their idea of using LLMs as evaluators is similar to some previous research papers, such as G-Eval [1]. [1] Y. Liu, D. Iter, Y. Xu, S. Wang, R. Xu, and C. Zhu. G-eval: Nlg evaluation using gpt-4 with better human alignment. CoRR, abs/2303.16634, 2023.

Questions

Major questions: 1. The paper utilizes LLMs as evaluators for Interactive Question Answering. However, according to some previous research papers [2], a systematic bias may be introduced by LLM evaluators and the results of evaluation may be influenced. Did you consider the impact of bias on the results in your research and try any methods to eliminate it? 2. You mentioned that accurate models are not necessarily preferred by humans in your paper, but you did not demonstrate this result in your experiments. Could you add a control group in your experiment? 3. There exists some errors in your analysis of LEA for stage 2. You stated that models’ evaluations highly correlate with human evaluation, while the Pearson correlation coefficient between 0.2 and 0.5 only indicates a weak or moderate correlation. 4. In your analysis of Table 1, you concluded that model gave higher scores for the “Fluency” metric than human because of the clarity and grammatical correctness of the response generated by IQA models. Could you please provide a detailed explanation of why you concluded that the model understands the concept of “Fluency” better than humans? Minor questions: 1. Could you please point out the LEA model used in the experiments shown in Table 3, like in Table 1 and 2? [2] P. Wang, L. Li, L. Chen, D. Zhu, B. Lin, Y. Cao, Q. Liu, T. Liu, and Z. Sui. Large language models are not fair evaluators. CoRR, abs/2305.17926, 2023.

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

Yes

Reviewer unmC5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-11

Summary

This paper introduces IQA-EVAL, a framework for automatically evaluating interactive question-answering (IQA) systems using large language models. The authors propose using LLM-based Evaluation Agents (LEAs) to simulate human behavior in both generating interactions with IQA models and evaluating those interactions. The framework also incorporates persona assignments to LEAs to better represent diverse user groups. The authors demonstrate that IQA-EVAL achieves high correlation with human judgments and use it to benchmark several recent LLMs on complex question-answering tasks.

Strengths

- Proposes a fully automated framework for evaluating interactive QA systems, addressing the need for more efficient evaluation methods - Incorporates persona assignments to LEAs, allowing for more nuanced and diverse simulations of user interactions - Demonstrates strong correlation with human judgments

Weaknesses

- Limited novelty, as using LLMs as judges is quite common in evaluation tasks. This paper mainly focuses on a relatively new setting - the interactive QA setting. - The considered interaction scenarios could be more diverse to better reflect real-world user behaviors

Questions

- Line 207~213: can you provide more explanations into why ChatGPT sometimes outperformed GPT-4 in your experiments? This seems counterintuitive given GPT-4's generally stronger capabilities. - Have you considered incorporating more diverse interaction patterns, such as clarification questions, ambiguous queries, or follow-up questions? How might this affect the evaluation results? - Have you explored how different persona distributions might impact the evaluation results? How sensitive is the framework to changes in persona assignments?

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

The authors have made some effort to address limitations, such as acknowledging potential biases in LLM-based evaluation and discussing the impact of persona assignments. However, the paper would benefit from discussing the limited diversity of interaction patterns considered.

Reviewer JewS7/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-12

Summary

The authors introduce a novel method to simulate a human conversation when evaluated on an interactive question answering (IQA) and evaluate the simulated interaction according to some predefined metrics.

Strengths

- The presentation of the paper is clear and easy to follow - The paper is well-motivated. It recognizes how costly and time-consuming it is to use human evaluations - The idea is reasonable

Weaknesses

When using LLMs to evaluate the outputs from LLMs, recent research has shown LLMs to be biased in preferring their own generations compared to generations from other models, even if their generation wasn’t better [0]. This may bias the IQA-EVAL metrics if the same model is used for both IQA-EVAL and the IQA model. The authors provided limited evidence for their claims in section 4.3. Could the authors provide a more robust justification of why “ChatGPT’s assessments align well with human evaluations”, and other claims made in this section? The authors did not recognise that this method could cause negative societal impacts, instead stating “Evaluation works bear little risks for negative scoeital impacts”. LLMs have been repeatedly shown to exhibit strong biases as a result of their training procedure. Using LLMs for evaluation opens the risk of reinforcing these biases, whether within training of future models, or benchmark answers, or whatever is downstream of this method. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13076

Questions

See Weaknesses

Rating

7

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors addressed the limitations.

Reviewer RAi26/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-13

Summary

This research addresses the evaluation methodology for multi-turn conversation using Large Language Models (LLMs), a topic of active research recently. The study proposes an evaluation framework called IQA-Eval, which consists of the target model (IQA model) and an agent (LEA model) that engages in conversation with the IQA model and evaluates each turn. The primary challenge in multi-turn evaluation is to 1) interactively converse with the IQA model and 2) evaluate each generated turn in a cost and time-efficient manner. This research aims to overcome this challenge by leveraging LLMs that consider personas to facilitate both conversation and evaluation. Through various experiments, the study confirms that applying LLMs for conversation and evaluation results in a high correlation with Human Evaluation. Additionally, it includes an analysis of the differences in the number of turns due to the varying capabilities of each IQA model.

Strengths

1.Compared to existing LLM multi-turn evaluations, this approach enables faster and more economical assessments. 2.Examining the human correlation suggests that the evaluation is reliable. It is very promising in that it allows for automatic evaluation of interactive multi-turn conversation capabilities that resemble real-world scenarios. 3.The evaluation framework is very simple, making it adaptable for assessing various multi-turn situations.

Weaknesses

- The evaluation dataset consists entirely of multiple-choice questions, making it unsuitable for generating and evaluating multi-turn conversations. This is evident in Tables 3 and 5, where the average length of conversation turns is less than 2. Such a situation suggests that the process might be more about reasoning rather than simulating genuine interactive multi-turn conversations. It is necessary to analyze whether the performance shown in Table 6 is due to multi-turn interactions or the influence of the reasoning path. Alternatively, an evaluation using datasets that assume genuine multi-turn dialogue scenarios is needed. - The verification process for personas is lacking. There is no substantial evidence to consider that the performance differences by persona shown in Table 4 are reflective of the actual characteristics of those personas. - A self-preference issue appears to have arisen in Table 5, and there is no control in place to address this.

Questions

- How does the Free Form Feedback in this study differ from the explanations provided by existing LLM-based evaluation methods (such as LLM-Eval and G-Eval)? - What is the total number of repetitions for the experiments mentioned in section 5.2? Could you provide the variance values for each experiment? - Why are the results for AmbigQA not included? Even if the performance of the IQA models is not optimal, the results should still be presented.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

1

Contribution

2

Limitations

- The limitations are stated in the Appendix, clearly outlining the limitations of the experiments.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-07

More clarification on the reply to question 3

We are sorry for the minor inaccuracy in the original reply to question 3. We expect that IQA-EVAL is sensitive to incorrect persona assignments. We conduct two new experiments to study the effects of changing persona assignments. When the persona distribution is incorrect (such as 20% Expert in the table below), the performance of IQA-EVAL shows a lower correlation with human evaluations. Moreover, the last two lines in the following table describe the correlation between human evaluations and IQA-EVAL within a sub-group only containing pure experts. The correlation results in line “IQA-EVAL (Pure Expert)” represent that (1) our personas accurately represent the pure expert group, as its correlation with the line “Human (Pure Expert)” remains nearly consistent with those in line “IQA-EVAL (Expert)” and (2) given this completely correct persona distribution, our IQA-EVAL correlates well with human evaluations. | 5-point Likert | Helpfulness | | | | Fluency | | | | | ----------------------------- | ----------- | ---- | ---- | ----- | ------- | ---- | ---- | ----- | | LEA models | TDA | TB | DA | ρ | TDA | TB | DA | ρ | | Human | 4.60 | 3.84 | 3.52 | | 4.35 | 3.84 | 3.22 | | | IQA-EVAL (Expert) | 4.17 | 3.08 | 3.12 | 0.756 | 4.47 | 3.84 | 3.40 | 0.787 | | IQA-EVAL (20% <br><br>Expert) | 4.31 | 3.26 | 3.44 | 0.708 | 4.62 | 4.09 | 3.65 | 0.741 | | IQA-EVAL (40% <br><br>Expert) | 4.21 | 3.14 | 3.23 | 0.751 | 4.49 | 3.88 | 3.44 | 0.779 | | IQA-EVAL (60% <br><br>Expert) | 4.11 | 3.01 | 3.00 | 0.725 | 4.43 | 3.77 | 3.34 | 0.734 | | IQA-EVAL (80% <br><br>Expert) | 4.02 | 2.90 | 2.79 | 0.680 | 4.30 | 3.56 | 3.12 | 0.703 | | Human (Pure Expert) | 4.69 | 4.00 | 3.73 | | 4.36 | 3.96 | 3.26 | | | IQA-EVAL (Pure Expert) | 4.37 | 3.57 | 3.33 | 0.778 | 4.20 | 3.40 | 2.97 | 0.786 | If you think we misunderstood your question, please let us know and feel free to ask any follow-up questions.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-08

More Responses to Weakness 1:

Both datasets, HotpotQA and AmbigQA, used in Table 5 are not multi-choice datasets. Their inputs and outputs are texts. HotpotQA requires LEA modes to output a short text including an answer to the given question and contexts. AmbigQA requires LEA models to disambiguous questions first and then answer that question by giving a short text. As you’ve suggested, we also benchmark IQA models in another dataset called Natural Questions [1]. This dataset comprises authentic questions posed by users about Wikipedia articles, demanding true multi-turn dialogues for resolution, akin to the setup in QuAC [2]. The experiment results are as follows: ---- LEA: Claude-3 | IQA models | Helpfulness | Fluency | # Queries | Accuracy | | ---------- | ----------- | ------- | --------- | -------- | | GPT3.5 | 4.86 | 4.88 | 2.82 | 0.42 | | Claude | 4.88 | 4.90 | 3.02 | 0.38 | | Llama2 | 4.90 | 4.84 | 3.18 | 0.34 | | Zephyr | 4.84 | 4.90 | 3.02 | 0.28 | ---- LEA: GPT-4 | IQA models | Helpfulness | Fluency | # Queries | Accuracy | | ---------- | ----------- | ------- | --------- | -------- | | GPT3.5 | 4.12 | 5.00 | 2.76 | 0.44 | | Claude | 4.02 | 5.00 | 2.76 | 0.40 | | Llama2 | 3.20 | 4.84 | 3.08 | 0.32 | | Zephyr | 3.30 | 4.86 | 2.92 | 0.36 | ---- All numbers of queries in the first two tables are around 3, and each response to a query from IQA models contains an average of 2 sentences. Similar to Table 6 in the paper, we conduct non-interactive experiments on the following IQA models. | IQA models | # Sentences | Accuracy | | ---------- | ----------- | -------- | | GPT3.5 | 4.66 | 0.38 | | Claude | 3.16 | 0.34 | | Llama2 | 5.21 | 0.30 | | Zephyr | 4.68 | 0.24 | Given the above number of sentences in each IQA model’s response, the non-interactive outputs are roughly equivalent to about two interaction turns, less than three turns in interactive outputs. Thus, **The interaction process of IQA-EVAL involves not only reasoning processes but also simulating genuine interactive multi-turn conversations. This suggests that the performances shown in the first two tables above are driven more by multi-turn interactions than by reasoning processes.** Furthermore, these **interactions lead to enhanced accuracy**, as demonstrated by the superior results in the first two tables compared to those in the last table (non-interactive). If you think we misunderstood your question and if you have further questions, please let us know. Reference: 1. Kwiatkowski, Tom, et al. "Natural questions: a benchmark for question answering research." Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 7 (2019): 453-466. 2. Choi, Eunsol, et al. "QuAC: Question answering in context." arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.07036 (2018).

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-08

Additional global response: new methodology to further mitigate self-favoring bias

We designed a new methodology to further mitigate self-favoring bias. In this experiment, multiple LEA models evaluate the performance of IQA models during each interaction (“Multi-perspective”). In other words, we introduced third-party evaluations, where various LEA models assess the IQA models' performance instead of relying solely on the LEA model itself involved in the interaction. After evaluation, we use the average score from all LEA models as the final score. The results of IQA-Eval-Multi-perspective look as follows: (**Bold** numbers indicate they are the closest to human results.) | | Helpfulness | | | Fluency | | | # Queries | | | Accuracy | | | | --------------------------------- | ----------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | --------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- | | LEA models | TDA | TB | DA | TDA | TB | DA | TDA | TB | DA | TDA | TB | DA | | Human | 4.60 | 3.84 | 3.52 | 4.35 | 3.84 | 3.22 | 1.78 | 2.57 | 2.66 | 0.69 | 0.52 | 0.48 | | IQA-EVAL-GPT4-Multi-perspective | **4.32** | **3.70** | **3.53** | 4.57 | **3.74** | 3.68 | **1.57** | 2.27 | **2.3**7 | 0.87 | 0.83 | 0.67 | | IQA-EVAL-Claude-Multi-perspective | 3.96 | 3.13 | 3.10 | **4.29** | 3.51 | **3.22** | 2.20 | **2.67** | 2.07 | **0.6**7 | **0.53** | 0.57 | | IQA-EVAL-GPT3.5-Multi-perspective | 3.98 | 3.23 | 3.04 | **4.41** | 3.67 | 3.59 | **1.57** | 1.77 | 2.00 | 0.63 | 0.47 | **0.53** | ---- The correlations between IQA-Eval-Multi-perspective and human evaluations are as follows: | | Helpfulness | Fluency | Overall | | ---------- | ----------- | --------- | --------- | | IQA-EVAL-GPT4-Multi-perspective | **0.702** | 0.601 | **0.624** | | IQA-EVAL-Claude-Multi-perspective | 0.663 | **0.613** | 0.602 | | IQA-EVAL-GPT3.5-Multi-perspective | 0.641 | 0.552 | 0.533 | The overall result shows that GPT-4 is the best model aligning with human evaluations.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

shall we have more discussions

Dear Reviewer, The discussion period is ending. Do you have any other questions of interest? In our previous rebuttal, we have added relevant explanations and several experiments, and we believe that these can to some extent address your concerns. We are eagerly looking forward to your response!

Area Chair oCjR2024-08-12

Reviewer please respond

Dear reviewer, Thank you for your efforts in reviewing this paper. Now that the authors have provided their response, do you have any further comments? Thank you, AC

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

More discussions?

Dear Reviewer, The discussion period is ending. Do you have any other questions of interest? In our previous rebuttal, we have added relevant explanations and several experiments, and we believe that these can address your concerns. We are eagerly looking forward to your response!

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

More discussions

Dear Reviewer, The discussion period is ending. Do you have any other questions of interest? In our previous rebuttal, we have added relevant explanations and several experiments, and we believe that these can to some extent address your concerns. We are eagerly looking forward to your response!

Area Chair oCjR2024-08-12

Reviewer please respond

Dear reviewer, Thank you for your efforts in reviewing this paper. Now that the authors have provided their response, do you have any further comments? Thank you, AC

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

More discussions?

Dear Reviewer, The discussion period is ending. Do you have any other questions of interest? In our previous rebuttal, we have added relevant explanations and several experiments, and we believe that these can address your concerns. We are eagerly looking forward to your response!

Reviewer RXxM2024-08-14

Response to the authors

Sorry for the late reply! Thank you for your reply, my concern has been addressed. I have raised my score.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

More discussions

Dear Reviewer, The discussion period is ending. Do you have any other questions of interest? In our previous rebuttal, we have added relevant explanations and several experiments, and we believe that these can to some extent address your concerns. We are eagerly looking forward to your response!

Area Chair oCjR2024-08-12

Reviewer please respond

Dear reviewer, Thank you for your efforts in reviewing this paper. Now that the authors have provided their response, do you have any further comments? Thank you, AC

Reviewer unmC2024-08-13

Thanks authors' for the detailed responses. While some of my questions have been addressed with more explanations, my overall opinions remain the same. I still think the contribution "augment LLM-agent with personas for eval" is a bit marginal, I tend to keep my score unchanged.

Reviewer JewS2024-08-12

I am grateful for the further analysis presented by the authors. Given their sound arguments, I am going to raise my score to a 7.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

Reply to Ethics Review

We follow the method proposed by Sheng et al. [1] and conduct a new experiment to evaluate the offensiveness and harmfulness of our personas using the RealToxicityPrompts dataset [2] on our LEA models. The results are in the table below: | Persona | Offensiveness IQA-EVAL-GPT3.5 | Offensiveness IQA-EVAL-Claude | Harmful IQA-EVAL-GPT3.5 | Harmful IQA-EVAL-Claude | | ------------------- | ----------------------------- | ----------------------------- | ----------------------- | ----------------------- | | None | 89.5 | 91.7 | 62.5 | 72.5 | | Expert | 95.5 | 97.3 | 67.8 | 75.5 | | Critical-Thinker | 93.3 | 95.5 | 65.4 | 73.7 | | Adaptability-Seeker | 94.5 | 95.5 | 62.8 | 74.6 | | Clarity-Seeker | 95.0 | 94.0 | 62.5 | 73.0 | The values in the table above represent the success rates (higher is better) for each bias metric, persona, and LEA model (GPT-3.5 and Claude). Scores labeled "None" are consistently lower than those for all personas, indicating that our personas do not increase offensiveness or harmfulness in conversations. # Ethics Statement In our study, we meticulously crafted each persona to mitigate bias, ensuring they do not adversely impact the IQA-Eval process, as evidenced by the results presented in the table above. However, our personas represent only a limited range. There exists the potential for negative effects from other personas that may be inadequately designed or deliberately biased to achieve specific outcomes. Thus, we oppose irresponsible persona designs that result in biased evaluation results. The principle of persona definition and design should be thoroughly studied in future works. We hope our work will help facilitate future research into better automatic interaction evaluations aligning with crowds. References: 1. Sheng, Emily, et al. "Revealing persona biases in dialogue systems." arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.08728 (2021). 2. Gehman, S.; Gururangan, S.; Sap, M.; Choi, Y.; and Smith, N. A. 2020. RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, 3356– 3369. Online: Association for Computational Linguistics

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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