arXiv:2505.20295cs.CLcs.AI2025-05中稿 · ICLR被引 4

测试大模型能否输出内部答案分布,发现其普遍无法自省不确定性。

SelfReflect: Can LLMs Communicate Their Internal Answer Distribution?

  • 设计信息论度量SelfReflect,评估摘要与模型真实答案分布的匹配度。
  • 多数大模型无法通过推理或提示揭示自身不确定性,即使微调也无效。
  • 若提供多轮采样结果回溯上下文,模型可生成可信的不确定性摘要。

当前大语言模型(LLM)表达不确定性的常见方法是在回答中添加百分比或模糊词汇。但这是全部手段吗?理想的透明模型应能反思其内部信念分布,并输出所有可能答案及其概率。为此,我们提出SelfReflect指标——一种衡量摘要与答案分布间信息距离的度量。在干预实验和人类评估中,SelfReflect能检测微小偏差,精确反映摘要与模型真实内部分布的一致性。结果显示:现代大模型普遍无法通过推理、思维链或显式微调揭示其不确定性。然而,若通过采样多个输出并反馈至上下文,模型可生成忠实的不确定性摘要。这一简单方法为未来统一表达模型不确定性的范式指明方向。相关代码已开源:https://github.com/apple/ml-selfreflect。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The common approach to communicate a large language model's (LLM) uncertainty is to add a percentage number or a hedging word to its response. But is this all we can do? Instead of generating a single answer and then hedging it, an LLM that is fully transparent to the user needs to be able to reflect on its internal belief distribution and output a summary of all options it deems possible, and how likely they are. To test whether LLMs possess this capability, we develop the SelfReflect metric, an information-theoretic distance between a given summary and a distribution over answers. In interventional and human studies, we find that SelfReflect indicates even slight deviations, yielding a fine measure of faithfulness between a summary string and an LLM's actual internal distribution over answers. With SelfReflect, we make a resounding negative observation: modern LLMs are, across the board, incapable of revealing what they are uncertain about, neither through reasoning, nor chains-of-thoughts, nor explicit finetuning. However, we do find that LLMs are able to generate faithful summaries of their uncertainties if we help them by sampling multiple outputs and feeding them back into the context. This simple approach shines a light at the universal way of communicating LLM uncertainties whose future development the SelfReflect score enables. To support the development of this universal form of LLM uncertainties, we publish the code that implements our metric for arbitrary LLMs under https://github.com/apple/ml-selfreflect .

大模型不确定性可解释性SelfReflect

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