发现大模型长文摘要存在中间内容忽视的忠实性偏差,提出缓解方法。
On Positional Bias of Faithfulness for Long-form Summarization
- 通过八个数据集构建基准,验证了生成摘要时位置偏差的存在。
- 总结忠实度呈U形分布,开头和结尾信息更准确,中间内容易被忽略。
- 提示工程可有效引导注意力,适合需要高忠实度摘要的场景。
大型语言模型在长上下文设置下常表现出位置偏差,对输入中间内容关注不足。本文研究长文本摘要中的此类偏差及其对忠实度的影响,并探索多种缓解策略。为一致评估忠实度,我们首先构建了一个包含八个经人工标注的长文本摘要数据集,并对现有忠实度指标进行元评估。结果表明,基于LLM的忠实度指标虽在完整上下文输入下表现良好,但仍受文档顺序影响,存在位置偏差。在六个数据集上分析LLM生成的摘要,发现忠实度呈现‘U形’趋势:模型能忠实概括文档首尾,却忽视中间内容。改变文档顺序后,重要信息置于中间时,模型忠实度下降。该现象部分源于上下文长度变化带来的注意力转移:随着上下文增长,忠实度先降后升,因模型逐渐聚焦于末尾。最后,我们测试不同生成技术以降低位置偏差,发现提示技巧能有效引导模型关注特定位置,而更复杂方法改进有限。相关数据与代码已公开于 https://github.com/meetdavidwan/longformfact。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit positional bias in long-context settings, under-attending to information in the middle of inputs. We investigate the presence of this bias in long-form summarization, its impact on faithfulness, and various techniques to mitigate this bias. To consistently evaluate faithfulness, we first compile a benchmark of eight human-annotated long-form summarization datasets and perform a meta-evaluation of faithfulness metrics. We show that LLM-based faithfulness metrics, though effective with full-context inputs, remain sensitive to document order, indicating positional bias. Analyzing LLM-generated summaries across six datasets, we find a "U-shaped" trend in faithfulness, where LLMs faithfully summarize the beginning and end of documents but neglect middle content. Perturbing document order similarly reveals models are less faithful when important documents are placed in the middle of the input. We find that this behavior is partly due to shifting focus with context length: as context increases, summaries become less faithful, but beyond a certain length, faithfulness improves as the model focuses on the end. Finally, we experiment with different generation techniques to reduce positional bias and find that prompting techniques effectively direct model attention to specific positions, whereas more sophisticated approaches offer limited improvements. Our data and code are available in https://github.com/meetdavidwan/longformfact.
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