The Hallucinations Leaderboard -- An Open Effort to Measure Hallucinations in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the Natural Language Processing (NLP) landscape with their remarkable ability to understand and generate human-like text. However, these models are prone to ``hallucinations'' -- outputs that do not align with factual reality or the input context. This paper introduces the Hallucinations Leaderboard, an open initiative to quantitatively measure and compare the tendency of each model to produce hallucinations. The leaderboard uses a comprehensive set of benchmarks focusing on different aspects of hallucinations, such as factuality and faithfulness, across various tasks, including question-answering, summarisation, and reading comprehension. Our analysis provides insights into the performance of different models, guiding researchers and practitioners in choosing the most reliable models for their applications.

Edinburgh Clinical NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Fine-tune your model unless you have access to GPT-4

The NLI4CT task assesses Natural Language Inference systems in predicting whether hypotheses entail or contradict evidence from Clinical Trial Reports. In this study, we evaluate various Large Language Models (LLMs) with multiple strategies, including Chain-of-Thought, In-Context Learning, and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). We propose a PEFT method to improve the consistency of LLMs by merging adapters that were fine-tuned separately using triplet and language modelling objectives. We found that merging the two PEFT adapters improves the F1 score (+0.0346) and consistency (+0.152) of the LLMs. However, our novel methods did not produce more accurate results than GPT-4 in terms of faithfulness and consistency. Averaging the three metrics, GPT-4 ranks joint-first in the competition with 0.8328. Finally, our contamination analysis with GPT-4 indicates that there was no test data leakage.

Discern and Answer: Mitigating the Impact of Misinformation in Retrieval-Augmented Models with Discriminators

Most existing retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) for question answering assume all retrieved information is factually correct. In this work, we study a more realistic scenario in which retrieved documents may contain misinformation, causing conflicts among them. We observe that the existing models are highly brittle to such information in both fine-tuning and in-context few-shot learning settings. We propose approaches to make retrieval-augmented LMs robust to misinformation by explicitly fine-tuning a discriminator or prompting to elicit discrimination capability in GPT-3. Our empirical results on open-domain question answering show that these approaches significantly improve LMs' robustness to knowledge conflicts. We also provide our findings on interleaving the fine-tuned model's decision with the in-context learning process, paving a new path to leverage the best of both worlds.

UHD-BERT: Bucketed Ultra-High Dimensional Sparse Representations for Full Ranking

Neural information retrieval (IR) models are promising mainly because their semantic matching capabilities can ameliorate the well-known synonymy and polysemy problems of word-based symbolic approaches. However, the power of neural models' dense representations comes at the cost of inefficiency, limiting it to be used as a re-ranker. Sparse representations, on the other hand, can help enhance symbolic or latent-term representations and yet take advantage of an inverted index for efficiency, being amenable to symbolic IR techniques that have been around for decades. In order to transcend the trade-off between sparse representations (symbolic or latent-term based) and dense representations, we propose an ultra-high dimensional (UHD) representation scheme equipped with directly controllable sparsity. With the high dimensionality, we attempt to make the meaning of each dimension less entangled and polysemous than dense embeddings. The sparsity allows for not only efficiency for vector calculations but also the possibility of making individual dimensions attributable to interpretable concepts. Our model, UHD-BERT, maximizes the benefits of ultra-high dimensional (UHD) sparse representations based on BERT language modeling, by adopting a bucketing method. With this method, different segments of an embedding (horizontal buckets) or the embeddings from multiple layers of BERT (vertical buckets) can be selected and merged so that diverse linguistic aspects can be represented. An additional and important benefit of our highly disentangled (high-dimensional) and efficient (sparse) representations is that this neural approach can be harmonized with well-studied symbolic IR techniques (e.g., inverted index, pseudo-relevance feedback, BM25), enabling us to build a powerful and efficient neuro-symbolic information retrieval system.