Arka Pal


2024

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Calibration-Tuning: Teaching Large Language Models to Know What They Don’t Know
Sanyam Kapoor | Nate Gruver | Manley Roberts | Arka Pal | Samuel Dooley | Micah Goldblum | Andrew Wilson
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP (UncertaiNLP 2024)

Large language models are increasingly deployed for high-stakes decision making, for example in financial and medical applications. In such applications, it is imperative that we be able to estimate our confidence in the answers output by a language model in order to assess risks. Although we can easily compute the probability assigned by a language model to the sequence of tokens that make up an answer, we cannot easily compute the probability of the answer itself, which could be phrased in numerous ways.While other works have engineered ways of assigning such probabilities to LLM outputs, a key problem remains: existing language models are poorly calibrated, often confident when they are wrong or unsure when they are correct. In this work, we devise a protocol called *calibration tuning* for finetuning LLMs to output calibrated probabilities. Calibration-tuned models demonstrate superior calibration performance compared to existing language models on a variety of question-answering tasks, including open-ended generation, without affecting accuracy. We further show that this ability transfers to new domains outside of the calibration-tuning train set.