Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation
Paper · 2024 · Xiaoying Zhang, Baolin Peng, Ye Tian et al.
Summary
Large language models sometimes state false facts even when the correct knowledge is stored in their parameters. This is a gap between what they "know" and what they "tell." Existing fixes usually depend on human factuality labels or domain-specific data. The authors propose Self-Alignment for Factuality, in which the model grades its own outputs.
For each prompt, several candidate answers are sampled. Long texts are split into atomic claims, each paired with an automatically generated question. The model then estimates how likely each claim is to be true (SELF-EVAL). The averaged scores rank the candidates, and the resulting preference pairs are used to fine-tune the same model with Direct Preference Optimization. To make these self-judgments more trustworthy, SK-TUNING trains the model on varied knowledge-oriented tasks, which sharpens its confidence estimation and calibration.
The method was tested on TruthfulQA and BioGEN across multiple-choice QA, short-form and long-form generation. Using no human annotation, it raises the factual accuracy of 7B LLAMA-family models and outperforms representation-editing baselines and consistency-based confidence rewards.
Key points
- The pipeline has three steps: few-shot response sampling, self-evaluation (claim extraction, question generation, P(True)-style scoring), and preference-pair construction followed by DPO fine-tuning.
- SELF-EVAL-SKT beats plain LLAMA2-7B on five MCQA tasks, with gains of more than 16% on CommonsenseQA and about 12% on OpenBookQA (Closed-Form).
- Calibration curves on CommonsenseQA show that SELF-EVAL-P(TRUE) is clearly overconfident, while SK-TUNING produces much better-calibrated confidence.
- Baselines include representation-editing methods such as DoLa (Chuang et al., 2023) and the consistency-based factuality rewards of Tian et al. (2023a). GPT-4 was used for BioGEN data collection and evaluation.
- Experiments cover only 7B models. Proposed next steps include 13B/70B variants, RLHF-tuned LLAMA2-CHAT, and combining the method with DoLa. Code is available at github.com/zhangxy-2019/Self-Alignment-for-Factuality.
Institutions
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 3,486 works
🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Language models & pretraining · 3,894 works
Cite
Cite as Xiaoying Zhang, Baolin Peng, Ye Tian, Jingyan Zhou, Lifeng Jin, Linfeng Song, Haitao Mi and Helen Meng. 2024. Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{zhang2024self,
title = {{Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation}},
author = {Xiaoying Zhang, Baolin Peng, Ye Tian, Jingyan Zhou, Lifeng Jin, Linfeng Song, Haitao Mi and Helen Meng},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.107},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.107}
}References
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