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LACIE: Listener-Aware Finetuning for Confidence Calibration in Large Language Models

This is the official implementation for LACIE

Authors: Elias Stengel-Eskin, Peter Hase, Mohit Bansal

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

When answering questions, large language models (LLMs) can convey not only an answer to the question, but a level of confidence about the answer being correct. This includes explicit markers of confidence (e.g. giving a numeric confidence score) as well as implicit markers, like using an authoritative tone or elaborating with additional knowledge of a subject. For LLMs to be trustworthy sources of knowledge, the confidence they convey should match their actual expertise on a topic; however, this is currently not the case, with most models tending towards overconfidence. To calibrate both implicit and explicit confidence markers, we introduce LACIE, a pragmatic, listener-aware finetuning method that directly models the listener, considering not only whether an answer is right, but whether it will be accepted by a listener.

Paper: arxiv

Installation

Requires python=3.10+; a Conda environment is recommended.

git clone git@github.com:esteng/pragmatic_calibration.git
cd pragmatic_calibration
pip install -r requirements

Evaluation also involves installation of the calibration_metric library:

git clone git@github.com:esteng/calibration_metric.git 
cd calibration_metric
pip install -e .

Uncompressing data

While the data can be regenerated using the configs in trained_calibration/configs we provide the data used in data.tar.gz, which can be uncompressed by

tar -xzvf data.tar.gz

Organization

• scripts/dpo/trivia_qa: scripts for training and evaluating LACIE and baseline models
• scripts/dpo/truthful_qa: scripts for evaluating LACIE and baseline models on TruthfulQA
• trained_calibration/:
  • trained_calibration/configs: config files for generating data.
  • trained_calibration/rl:
    • trained_calibration/rl/dataset: utils for generating data
    • trained_calibration/rl/train: utils for DPO training
    • trained_calibration/rl/evaluate_dpo.py: testing script
  • trained_calibration/eval: scripts for computing scores (requires calibration metric)

Generating data

Data can be generated by running

python trained_calibration/rl/dataset/dpo_dataset.py --cfg trained_calibration/configs/dpo/<config_file>.yaml

An example is given in scripts/generate_10k.sh.

After data generation, data is assumed to be stored in the data dir.

Training models

Based on generated data (stored as jsonlines), we can train models using DPO. An example script of this can be found in scripts/dpo/trivia_qa/main/train_mistral_v1_on_10k_balanced.sh which takes one argument (a random seed). Options can be found by running python trained_calibration/rl/train/train_dpo.py -h.

Training automatically assumes access to wandb. Trained checkpoints will appear in models by default. Training requires multiple GPUs with at least 40Gb memory (L40s or A6000s). Training generally takes around 24 hours, depending on hardware.

Evaluating models

After training, models can be evaluated on TriviaQA or TruthfulQA data. An example is given in scripts/dpo/trivia_qa/eval_mistral_on_valid.sh. This takes as arguments the trained model checkpoint (in models) as well as a random seed. By default, the decoded generations are written to the checkpoint directory, in a file called eval_dpo_on_valid.jsonl; by default, evaluation is done on the held-out split of 1000 questions from TriviaQA.
Testing uses both a speaker and listener model, and thus requires 2 GPUs.

Scoring TriviaQA generations

To obtain automated metrics like those in Table 1 of our paper, the following commands should be run:

python trained_calibration/eval/dpo_eval.py --eval_file <path_to_checkpoint>/eval_dpo_on_valid.jsonl --threshold 0.66
python trained_calibration/eval/dpo_eval.py --eval_file <path_to_checkpoint>/eval_dpo_on_valid.jsonl --threshold 0.66 --no-skip_none 

This evaluates with both skipping abstained outputs and keeping them, producing two score files: eval_data_skip.jsonl and eval_data_noskip.jsonl. Metrics from these files can be aggregated using scripts/dpo/collect_results.py, which takes a model pattern (a regex that matches the directories where you stored your models, e.g. trivia_qa_mistral_*) and a path for where to write the CSV results.

Scoring TruthfulQA generations

After decoding, TruthfulQA outputs can be scored using trained_calibration/eval/truthful_qa_eval.py, which uses two evaluator models to score TruthfulQA generations. As a result, TruthfulQA evaluation requires a GPU to run in a reasonable time.

Reference

Please cite our paper if you use our models in your works:

@article{stengeleskin2024listener,
  title={LACIE: Listener-Aware Finetuning for Confidence Calibration in Large Language Models},
  author={Stengel-Eskin, Elias and Hase, Peter and Bansal, Mohit}, 
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.21028},
  year={2024}
}