arXiv:2503.19168cs.CL2025-03被引 20

让大模型自己找出推理关键路径,更准判断回答可信度。

Language Model Uncertainty Quantification with Attention Chain

  • 通过回溯注意力权重,提取影响答案的关键推理步骤链
  • 在多个推理基准上,不确定性估计准确率显著提升
  • 适合需要可信输出的AI应用,如医疗诊断与法律辅助

准确量化大语言模型(LLM)的预测不确定性对评估其回答可靠性至关重要。现有研究多聚焦于可直接作答的封闭式问题(如多选题),而随着包含中间推理步骤的回答日益重要,不确定性量化面临新挑战:答案词的概率受海量前序推理词影响,直接边缘化不可行,依赖关系还会导致概率被高估,造成过度自信。为此,我们提出UQAC方法,通过迭代构建“注意力链”缩小推理空间,实现可计算的边缘化。该方法从答案词出发,利用注意力权重识别最相关的前驱词,逐层回溯至输入词,形成关键推理链;再经相似性过滤与概率阈值处理进一步压缩链条。我们在多个推理基准上使用先进开源大模型验证,结果表明,UQAC能持续提供可靠且高效的不确定性估计。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurately quantifying a large language model's (LLM) predictive uncertainty is crucial for judging the reliability of its answers. While most existing research focuses on short, directly answerable questions with closed-form outputs (e.g., multiple-choice), involving intermediate reasoning steps in LLM responses is increasingly important. This added complexity complicates uncertainty quantification (UQ) because the probabilities assigned to answer tokens are conditioned on a vast space of preceding reasoning tokens. Direct marginalization is infeasible, and the dependency inflates probability estimates, causing overconfidence in UQ. To address this, we propose UQAC, an efficient method that narrows the reasoning space to a tractable size for marginalization. UQAC iteratively constructs an "attention chain" of tokens deemed "semantically crucial" to the final answer via a backtracking procedure. Starting from the answer tokens, it uses attention weights to identify the most influential predecessors, then iterates this process until reaching the input tokens. The resulting chain is further refined with similarity filtering and probability thresholding, which reduce the reasoning space, facilitating the approximation of the marginal answer token probabilities. We validate UQAC on multiple reasoning benchmarks with advanced open-source LLMs, demonstrating that it consistently delivers reliable UQ estimates with high computational efficiency.

不确定性量化大模型注意力机制推理链

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