arXiv:2507.03998cs.AI2025-07

提升大模型不确定性估计的跨域泛化能力,结合通用特征与内部表示。

Toward Better Generalisation in Uncertainty Estimators: Leveraging Data-Agnostic Features

  • 融合数据无关特征与隐藏状态特征,增强跨领域泛化性能。
  • 在多数场景下,混合特征提升泛化效果,但特定情况下会降低性能。
  • 关键问题在于模型对通用特征的权重分配不足,影响整体表现。

大语言模型常生成看似正确但实际错误的回答,且自信度极高,可能对用户造成严重风险。因此,不仅需要输出答案,还需准确评估其正确性。不确定性量化方法被提出以评估大模型输出质量,其中事实准确性是核心指标。利用隐藏状态训练探测器的方法表现尤为突出,因其内部表征包含与事实相关的信息。然而,针对某一数据集训练的探测器往往难以泛化到不同任务或领域的数据。本文探索将数据无关特征与隐藏状态特征结合,评估该混合特征是否能提升跨域性能。同时研究仅保留最相关的隐藏状态特征(去除任务特异性噪声)是否能更有效发挥数据无关特征的作用。实验表明,引入数据无关特征虽在多数情况下提升泛化性能,但在某些场景下反而导致性能下降;仅保留重要隐藏状态特征后,加入数据无关特征也未显著优于使用完整隐藏状态特征的方案。深入分析发现,在部分情形中探测器对数据无关特征的权重过低,这可能是结果不一致的主要原因。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate responses that are factually incorrect yet expressed with high confidence, which can pose serious risks for end users. To address this, it is essential for LLMs not only to produce answers but also to provide accurate estimates of their correctness. Uncertainty quantification methods have been introduced to assess the quality of LLM outputs, with factual accuracy being a key aspect of that quality. Among these methods, those that leverage hidden states to train probes have shown particular promise, as these internal representations encode information relevant to the factuality of responses, making this approach the focus of this paper. However, the probe trained on the hidden states of one dataset often struggles to generalise to another dataset of a different task or domain. To address this limitation, we explore combining data-agnostic features with hidden-state features and assess whether this hybrid feature set enhances out-of-domain performance. We further examine whether selecting only the most informative hidden-state features, thereby discarding task-specific noise, enables the data-agnostic features to contribute more effectively. The experiment results indicate that although introducing data-agnostic features generally enhances generalisation performance in most cases, in certain scenarios their inclusion degrades performance. A similar pattern emerges when retaining only the most important hidden-state features - adding data-agnostic features does not consistently further enhance performance compared to using the full set of hidden-state features. A closer analysis reveals that, in some specific cases, the trained probe underweights the data-agnostic features relative to the hidden-state features, which we believe is the main reason why the results are inconclusive.

不确定性估计大模型泛化能力

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