HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition

Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. However, the alignment and coverage of LLM-based evaluations are often limited by the scope and potential bias of the evaluation prompts and criteria. To address this challenge, we propose HD-Eval, a novel framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference via Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition. HD-Eval inherits the essence from the evaluation mindset of human experts and enhances the alignment of LLM-based evaluators by decomposing a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria, aggregating them according to estimated human preferences, pruning insignificant criteria with attribution, and further decomposing significant criteria. By integrating these steps within an iterative alignment training process, we obtain a hierarchical decomposition of criteria that comprehensively captures aspects of natural language at multiple levels of granularity. Implemented as a white box, the human preference-guided aggregator is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompting, and its independence from model parameters makes it applicable to closed-source LLMs. Extensive experiments on three evaluation domains demonstrate the superiority of HD-Eval in further aligning state-of-the-art evaluators and providing deeper insights into the explanation of evaluation results and the task itself.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.413
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7641–7660
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.413
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, and Qi Zhang. 2024. HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7641–7660, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition (Liu et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.413.pdf