让大模型回答更可信,能控制出错率并保留更多有效答案
COIN: Uncertainty-Guarding Selective Question Answering for Foundation Models with Provable Risk Guarantees
- 基于校准集估计错误率,用置信区间确保测试时错误率可控
- 在指定错误率上限下,保留更多正确答案,比传统方法效率更高
- 适合对可靠性要求高的生成任务,尤其数据少时仍表现稳健
基础模型生成文本时常出现幻觉,量化不确定性对识别和缓解此问题至关重要。现有启发式方法缺乏对选择性预测中假发现率(FDR)的严格保障。以往工作采用分裂合取预测(SCP)构建预测集以保证覆盖率,但预测集中常包含错误候选,实用性受限。为此,我们提出COIN,一种不确定性防护的选择性问答框架,在用户指定的FDR约束下,为每个问题筛选单一生成答案。COIN在校准集上估计经验错误率,并使用Clopper-Pearson等置信区间方法建立真实错误率(即FDR)的高概率上界,从而确定最大可接受的不确定性阈值,确保测试时的FDR控制,同时显著提升样本保留率。我们在通用与多模态文本生成任务中验证了COIN在风险控制、测试时保留率及小样本下的预测效率方面的鲁棒性。此外,采用不同上界构造与不确定性评估策略可进一步提升性能,凸显其可扩展性与场景适应性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) for foundation models is essential to identify and mitigate potential hallucinations in automatically generated text. However, heuristic UQ approaches lack formal guarantees for key metrics such as the false discovery rate (FDR) in selective prediction. Previous work adopts the split conformal prediction (SCP) framework to ensure desired coverage of admissible answers by constructing prediction sets, but these sets often contain incorrect candidates, limiting their practical utility. To address this, we propose COIN, an uncertainty-guarding selection framework that calibrates statistically valid thresholds to filter a single generated answer per question under user-specified FDR constraints. COIN estimates the empirical error rate on a calibration set and applies confidence interval methods such as Clopper-Pearson to establish a high-probability upper bound on the true error rate (i.e., FDR). This enables the selection of the largest uncertainty threshold that ensures FDR control on test data while significantly increasing sample retention. We demonstrate COIN's robustness in risk control, strong test-time power in retaining admissible answers, and predictive efficiency under limited calibration data across both general and multimodal text generation tasks. Furthermore, we show that employing alternative upper bound constructions and UQ strategies can further boost COIN's power performance, which underscores its extensibility and adaptability to diverse application scenarios.
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