Juntong Song


2024

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RAG-HAT: A Hallucination-Aware Tuning Pipeline for LLM in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Juntong Song | Xingguang Wang | Juno Zhu | Yuanhao Wu | Xuxin Cheng | Randy Zhong | Cheng Niu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a significant advancement in the field of large language models (LLMs). By integrating up-to-date information not available during their initial training, RAG greatly enhances the practical utility of LLMs in real-world applications. However, even with RAG, LLMs can still produce inaccurate outputs, such as distorting or misinterpreting source content, posing risks in high-trust scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce a novel approach called Hallucination Aware Tuning (HAT). This method involves training hallucination detection models that generate detection labels and provide detailed descriptions of the detected hallucinations. Utilizing these detection results—particularly the hallucination descriptions—GPT-4 Turbo is employed to correct any detected hallucinations. The corrected outputs, free of hallucinations, along with the original versions, are used to create a preference dataset for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training. The fine-tuning through DPO leads to LLMs that exhibit a reduced rate of hallucinations and deliver improved answer quality.

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Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation
Cheng Niu | Xingguang Wang | Xuxin Cheng | Juntong Song | Tong Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is designed to monitor the evolving dialogue state in the conversations and plays a pivotal role in developing task-oriented dialogue systems. However, obtaining the annotated data for the DST task is usually a costly endeavor. In this paper, we focus on employing LLMs to generate dialogue data to reduce dialogue collection and annotation costs. Specifically, GPT-4 is used to simulate the user and agent interaction, generating thousands of dialogues annotated with DST labels. Then a two-stage fine-tuning on LLaMA 2 is performed on the generated data and the real data for the DST prediction. Experimental results on two public DST benchmarks show that with the generated dialogue data, our model performs better than the baseline trained solely on real data. In addition, our approach is also capable of adapting to the dynamic demands in real-world scenarios, generating dialogues in new domains swiftly. After replacing dialogue segments in any domain with the corresponding generated ones, the model achieves comparable performance to the model trained on real data. The source code and generated dialogue data are available at https://github.com/ParticleMedia/LUAS.

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RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
Cheng Niu | Yuanhao Wu | Juno Zhu | Siliang Xu | KaShun Shum | Randy Zhong | Juntong Song | Tong Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a main technique for alleviating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). Despite the integration of RAG, LLMs may still present unsupported or contradictory claims to the retrieved contents. In order to develop effective hallucination prevention strategies under RAG, it is important to create benchmark datasets that can measure the extent of hallucination. This paper presents RAGTruth, a corpus tailored for analyzing word-level hallucinations in various domains and tasks within the standard RAG frameworks for LLM applications. RAGTruth comprises nearly 18,000 naturally generated responses from diverse LLMs using RAG. These responses have undergone meticulous manual annotations at both the individual case and word levels, incorporating evaluations of hallucination intensity. We not only benchmark hallucination frequencies across different LLMs, but also critically assess the effectiveness of several existing hallucination detection methodologies. We show that using a high-quality dataset such as RAGTruth, it is possible to finetune a relatively small LLM and achieve a competitive hallucination detection performance when compared to the existing prompt-based approaches using state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-4. Furthermore, the finetuned model can effectively mitigate hallucination in LLM responses.

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VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning
Cheng Niu | Yang Guan | Yuanhao Wu | Juno Zhu | Juntong Song | Randy Zhong | Kaihua Zhu | Siliang Xu | Shizhe Diao | Tong Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. In response to this challenge, we introduce VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. Then sources’ credibility is leveraged for information verification. Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2 13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.