arXiv:2505.15443cs.CLstat.ML2025-05被引 1

通过轻量对齐提升大模型不确定性估计,更准识别错误预测。

ALIEN: Aligned Entropy Head for Improving Uncertainty Estimation of LLMs

  • 用小头模型对齐原始熵与预测可信度,改进不确定性判断。
  • 在7个分类数据集和2个命名实体识别任务中均优于基线,校准误差最低。
  • 仅增加0.5%参数量,推理延迟微乎其微,适合大规模部署。

不确定性估计在将预训练语言模型适配到下游分类任务时仍是一大挑战,模型常对困难样本过于自信。尽管预测熵提供了可靠的不确定性基准,但主要关注随机不确定性,难以捕捉类别重叠或语言线索模糊等影响。本文提出一种轻量级方法——对齐熵(ALIEN),通过将熵与预测可靠性对齐来优化不确定性估计。ALIEN训练一个初始输出原模型熵的小型不确定性头,并采用两种正则化机制进行微调。在七个分类数据集和两个命名实体识别基准上,使用五种语言模型(RoBERTa、ELECTRA、LLaMA-2、Qwen2.5、Qwen3)的实验表明,ALIEN在所有场景下均一致优于强基线,能更有效检测错误预测,同时达到最低校准误差。该方法引入的推理开销极小(每批在CPU上约毫秒级),编码器模型参数增加0.5%,解码器模型仅增加0.002%,无需存储中间状态。它在不修改主干模型的前提下,显著提升不确定性估计能力,适用于现代大模型的大规模部署。结果表明,通过轻量监督对齐,熵可被有效优化,获得更可靠的不确定性评估。代码已公开。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Uncertainty estimation remains a key challenge when adapting pre-trained language models to downstream classification tasks, with overconfidence often observed for difficult inputs. While predictive entropy provides a strong baseline for uncertainty estimation, it considers mainly aleatoric uncertainty and has limited capacity to capture effects, such as class overlap or ambiguous linguistic cues. We introduce Aligned Entropy - ALIEN, a lightweight method that refines entropy-based uncertainty by aligning it with prediction reliability. ALIEN trains a small uncertainty head initialized to produce the model's original entropy and subsequently fine-tuned with two regularization mechanisms. Experiments across seven classification datasets and two NER benchmarks, evaluated on five language models (RoBERTa, ELECTRA, LLaMA-2, Qwen2.5, and Qwen3), show that ALIEN consistently outperforms strong baselines across all considered scenarios in detecting incorrect predictions, while achieving the lowest calibration error. The proposed method introduces only a small inference overhead (in the order of milliseconds per batch on CPU) and increases the model's parameter count by just 0.002% for decoder models and 0.5% for encoder models, without requiring storage of intermediate states. It improves uncertainty estimation while preserving the original model architecture, making the approach practical for large-scale deployment with modern language models. Our results demonstrate that entropy can be effectively refined through lightweight supervised alignment, producing more reliable uncertainty estimates without modifying the backbone model. The code is available at 4.

不确定性估计大模型轻量优化

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