FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation

Tu Vu, Mohit Iyyer, Xuezhi Wang, Noah Constant, Jerry Wei, Jason Wei, Chris Tar, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Denny Zhou, Quoc Le, Thang Luong


Abstract
Since most large language models (LLMs) are trained once and never updated, they struggle to dynamically adapt to our ever-changing world. In this work, we present FreshQA, a dynamic QA benchmark that tests a model’s ability to answer questions that may require reasoning over up-to-date world knowledge. We develop a two-mode human evaluation procedure to measure both correctness and hallucination, which we use to benchmark both closed and open-source LLMs by collecting >50K human judgments. We observe that all LLMs struggle to answer questions that require fast-changing world knowledge as well as questions with false premises that need to be debunked. In response, we develop FreshPrompt, a few-shot prompting method that curates and organizes relevant information from a search engine into an LLM’s prompt. Our experiments show that FreshPrompt outperforms both competing search engine-augmented prompting methods such as Self-Ask (Press et al., 2022) as well as commercial systems such as Perplexity.AI. To facilitate future work, we additionally develop FreshEval, a reliable autorater for quick evaluation and comparison on FreshQA. Our latest results with FreshEval suggest that open-source LLMs such as Mixtral (Jiang et al., 2024), when combined with FreshPrompt, are competitive with closed-source and commercial systems on search-augmented QA.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.813
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13697–13720
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.813
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.813
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tu Vu, Mohit Iyyer, Xuezhi Wang, Noah Constant, Jerry Wei, Jason Wei, Chris Tar, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Denny Zhou, Quoc Le, and Thang Luong. 2024. FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 13697–13720, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation (Vu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.813.pdf