arXiv:2506.10301cs.IRcs.AI2025-06被引 17

用大模型生成评估数据存在偏差,影响绝对性能判断但对相对比较影响小。

Towards Understanding Bias in Synthetic Data for Evaluation

  • 用大模型生成查询和相关性标签构建合成测试集。
  • 实证发现合成数据导致评估结果出现显著偏差,尤其影响绝对性能衡量。
  • 适合关注评估可靠性与模型对比公平性的信息检索研究者。

测试集对于信息检索(IR)系统评估至关重要。构建多样化的用户查询颇具挑战,而获取相关性标注(即文档与查询匹配程度)则成本高昂。近年来,利用大语言模型(LLMs)生成合成数据在多个领域受到关注。尽管已有研究使用LLM生成合成查询或文档以提升排序模型,但利用LLM创建合成测试集仍较少被探索。先前工作表明合成测试集具备用于系统评估的潜力,但仍需深入分析验证。本文系统研究了基于LLM构建的合成测试集的可靠性,其中LLM用于生成合成查询、相关性标签或两者兼有。我们首先通过实证方法揭示评估结果中存在的偏差,并分析其对系统评估的影响。进一步采用线性混合效应模型验证偏差的存在。分析表明,虽然合成测试集中的偏差可能显著影响绝对性能评估,但在相对性能比较中影响较小。代码与数据已公开于:https://github.com/rahmanidashti/BiasSyntheticData。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Test collections are crucial for evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Creating a diverse set of user queries for these collections can be challenging, and obtaining relevance judgments, which indicate how well retrieved documents match a query, is often costly and resource-intensive. Recently, generating synthetic datasets using Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained attention in various applications. While previous work has used LLMs to generate synthetic queries or documents to improve ranking models, using LLMs to create synthetic test collections is still relatively unexplored. Previous work~\cite{rahmani2024synthetic} showed that synthetic test collections have the potential to be used for system evaluation, however, more analysis is needed to validate this claim. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the reliability of synthetic test collections constructed using LLMs, where LLMs are used to generate synthetic queries, labels, or both. In particular, we examine the potential biases that might occur when such test collections are used for evaluation. We first empirically show the presence of such bias in evaluation results and analyse the effects it might have on system evaluation. We further validate the presence of such bias using a linear mixed-effects model. Our analysis shows that while the effect of bias present in evaluation results obtained using synthetic test collections could be significant, for e.g.~computing absolute system performance, its effect may not be as significant in comparing relative system performance. Codes and data are available at: https://github.com/rahmanidashti/BiasSyntheticData.

信息检索合成数据大模型评估偏差分析

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