Enhancing Reliability in LLMs through Uncertainty Quantification and Bias Mitigation

The recent developments in the field of large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the understanding and application of uncertainty quantification and distributional semantics. A notable trend is the shift towards enabling LLMs to express and estimate uncertainty more accurately, which is crucial for enhancing their reliability in high-stakes applications. This is being achieved through innovative methods such as refinement-based data collection frameworks and two-stage training pipelines, which aim to improve the models' ability to express uncertainty in long-form responses. Additionally, there is a growing focus on mitigating biases, such as sycophancy, in uncertainty estimation by incorporating both model and user uncertainty. The field is also witnessing advancements in probabilistic programming and term rewriting, with new approaches being developed to model and compute probabilities in these systems. Furthermore, the integration of semantic entropy for fine-tuning LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their capabilities is proving to be an effective strategy for reducing hallucinations. Overall, these developments are paving the way for more trustworthy and reliable AI systems, particularly in contexts requiring nuanced understanding and accurate uncertainty representation.

Sources

Are LLMs Models of Distributional Semantics? A Case Study on Quantifiers

LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions

Do LLMs estimate uncertainty well in instruction-following?

Accounting for Sycophancy in Language Model Uncertainty Estimation

Eliciting Uncertainty in Chain-of-Thought to Mitigate Bias against Forecasting Harmful User Behaviors

A Distribution Semantics for Probabilistic Term Rewriting

A Survey of Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs: Theory Meets Practice

Fine-Tuning Large Language Models to Appropriately Abstain with Semantic Entropy

The Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine: A Novel Approach to Uncertainty Quantification

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