Temporally Consistent Factuality Probing for Large Language Models

Ashutosh Bajpai, Aaryan Goyal, Atif Anwer, Tanmoy Chakraborty


Abstract
The prolific use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an alternate knowledge base requires them to be factually consistent, necessitating both correctness and consistency traits for paraphrased queries. Recently, significant attempts have been made to benchmark datasets and metrics to evaluate LLMs for these traits. However, structural simplicity (subject-relation-object) and contemporary association in their query formulation limit the broader definition of factuality and consistency. In this study, we introduce TeCFaP, a novel Temporally Consistent Factuality Probe task to expand the consistent factuality probe in the temporal dimension. To this end, we propose TEMP-COFAC, a high-quality dataset of prefix-style English query paraphrases. Subsequently, we extend the definitions of existing metrics to represent consistent factuality across temporal dimension. We experiment with a diverse set of LLMs and find most of them performing poorly on TeCFaP. Next, we propose a novel solution CoTSeLF (Consistent-Time-Sensitive Learning Framework) combining multi-task instruction tuning (MT-IT) with consistent-time-sensitive reinforcement learning (CTSRL) to improve temporally consistent factuality in LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CoTSeLF over several baselines.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.887
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15864–15881
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.887
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ashutosh Bajpai, Aaryan Goyal, Atif Anwer, and Tanmoy Chakraborty. 2024. Temporally Consistent Factuality Probing for Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15864–15881, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Temporally Consistent Factuality Probing for Large Language Models (Bajpai et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.887.pdf