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TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.229.pdf

Summary

Language models often produce fluent but false statements. Some of these errors come from imperfect learning, but others appear because human-written training text itself repeats misconceptions. The authors call the second kind imitative falsehoods. To measure them, they built TruthfulQA, a zero-shot benchmark of 817 author-written questions in 38 categories, including health, law, finance, politics, conspiracies and fiction. Each question has true and false reference answers and a supporting source. Part of the set was adversarially filtered against GPT-3-175B. Humans rated answers for truthfulness and informativeness. An answer counts as truthful if it makes no false claim, so declining to answer is acceptable. A multiple-choice variant and a fine-tuned GPT-3 evaluator allow cheap automatic scoring. The authors tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J, GPT-2 and the T5-based UnifiedQA. The best model was truthful on only 58% of questions, compared with 94% for humans. Within model families, larger models were generally less truthful. This suggests that scaling alone will not fix truthfulness and that training objectives other than imitating web text are needed.

Key points

  • Dataset: TruthfulQA has 817 questions in 38 categories, with a median length of 9 words. Of these, 437 are "filtered" questions, kept because GPT-3-175B tended to answer them wrongly. The other 380 were written later without that test. The data and code are at github.com/sylinrl/TruthfulQA.
  • Main result: The best model was GPT-3-175B with a "helpful" prompt, truthful on 58% of questions against a 94% human baseline. It also gave false but informative answers 42% of the time, compared with 6% for humans.
  • Inverse scaling: Across GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J, GPT-2 and UnifiedQA, the largest models tended to score worst. For example, the 175B GPT-3 repeats the superstition about seven years of bad luck after breaking a mirror, while smaller models do not.
  • Automated judge: A GPT-3 model fine-tuned on human truth labels predicted human judgments with 90–96% accuracy on held-out models. A similar informativeness judge reached 86.3% on UnifiedQA.
  • Strict standard of truth: Claims count as true only if they are literally true about the real world, not true within a belief system such as astrology. The benchmark does not cover long-form or interactive generation.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Natural language processing

Cited by

1202 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 91 of them have a page here, 1111 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.229 · arXiv 2109.07958

@inproceedings{lin2022truthfulqa,
  title = {{TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods}},
  author = {Lin, Stephanie and Hilton, Jacob and Evans, Owain},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.229},
  eprint = {2109.07958},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.229}
}

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