Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models

Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen


Abstract
In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLM’s response, such as hallucination, have also been actively discussed. Existing works have been devoted to quantifying the uncertainty in LLM’s response, but they often overlook the complex nature of LLMs and the uniqueness of in-context learning. In this work, we delve into the predictive uncertainty of LLMs associated with in-context learning, highlighting that such uncertainties may stem from both the provided demonstrations (aleatoric uncertainty) and ambiguities tied to the model’s configurations (epistemic uncertainty). We propose a novel formulation and corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the decomposition. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/lingchen0331/UQ_ICL.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.184
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3357–3370
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.184
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, and Haifeng Chen. 2024. Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3357–3370, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models (Ling et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.184.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.184.copyright.pdf