Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding

Authors: Weijia Shi, Xiaochuang Han, Mike Lewis, Yulia Tsvetkov, Luke Zettlemoyer, Scott Wen-tau Yih

License: CC BY 4.0

Results of the summarizing process for the arXiv paper: 2305.14739v1

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The article discusses the issue of language models struggling to pay enough attention to input context, resulting in unfaithful or hallucinatory texts. To address this problem, the authors propose a solution called context-aware decoding (CAD), which amplifies the difference between output probabilities when a model is used with and without context. The experiments show that CAD significantly improves the faithfulness of different language models for summarization tasks, with a 14.3% gain in factuality metrics for LLaMA. CAD is particularly effective in overriding a model's prior knowledge when it contradicts the provided context, leading to substantial improvements in tasks where resolving knowledge conflicts is essential. The study introduces a hyperparameter α to control the adjustment level, with α = 0.5 generally yielding good results across all settings and datasets. The results on CNN-DM and XSUM datasets demonstrate that CAD outperforms standard decoding algorithms by a large margin, improving both the quality and factuality of generated summaries from diverse language models.
AI-generated keywords: Context-aware decoding Language models Factuality Hyperparameter Summarization

AI-generated Key Points

  • Language models struggle with paying enough attention to input context
  • Context-aware decoding (CAD) is proposed as a solution
  • CAD amplifies the difference between output probabilities with and without context
  • CAD significantly improves the faithfulness of language models for summarization tasks
  • LLaMA shows a 14.3% gain in factuality metrics with CAD
  • CAD overrides a model's prior knowledge when it contradicts the provided context
  • CAD leads to substantial improvements in resolving knowledge conflicts
  • Hyperparameter α controls the adjustment level, with α = 0.5 generally yielding good results
  • CAD outperforms standard decoding algorithms on CNN-DM and XSUM datasets
  • CAD improves both the quality and factuality of generated summaries from diverse language models
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Abstract: Language models (LMs) often struggle to pay enough attention to the input context, and generate texts that are unfaithful or contain hallucinations. To mitigate this issue, we present context-aware decoding (CAD), which follows a contrastive output distribution that amplifies the difference between the output probabilities when a model is used with and without context. Our experiments show that CAD, without additional training, significantly improves the faithfulness of different LM families, including OPT, GPT, LLaMA and FLAN-T5 for summarization tasks (e.g., 14.3% gain for LLaMA in factuality metrics). Furthermore, CAD is particularly effective in overriding a model's prior knowledge when it contradicts the provided context, leading to substantial improvements in tasks where resolving the knowledge conflict is essential.

Submitted to arXiv on 24 May. 2023

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