给大模型的问答不确定性建模,发现其本质是语义特征缺失。
Uncertainty as Feature Gaps: Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification of LLMs in Contextual Question-Answering
- 用交叉熵分解出认知不确定性,以理想模型逼近真实分布。
- 在多个基准上提升13点PRR,推理开销几乎为零。
- 适合需要可靠输出的场景,如医疗、法律问答系统。
不确定性量化(UQ)研究多集中于封闭书事实问答,而上下文问答仍待探索,尽管其在现实应用中至关重要。本文聚焦上下文问答任务的UQ,提出一种理论基础扎实的认知不确定性量化方法。首先定义一个与任务无关的词级不确定性度量,即模型预测分布与未知真实分布间的交叉熵。通过分解该度量,分离出认知成分,并用完美提示的理想化模型近似真实分布。进而推导出认知不确定性的上界,表明其可解释为当前模型隐藏表示相对于理想模型的语义特征差距。进一步将此通用框架应用于上下文问答任务,假设三个特征可逼近该差距:依赖上下文(使用提供内容而非参数知识)、理解上下文(提取相关资讯)和诚实性(避免故意说谎)。采用自上而下的可解释性方法,仅需少量标注样本即可提取这些特征,并集成形成鲁棒的不确定性评分。在多个问答基准上,涵盖分布内与分布外设置的实验表明,该方法显著优于现有无监督(无需采样与采样型)及有监督的UQ方法,在保持极低推理开销的前提下,实现最高达13点的PRR提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) research has primarily focused on closed-book factual question answering (QA), while contextual QA remains unexplored, despite its importance in real-world applications. In this work, we focus on UQ for the contextual QA task and propose a theoretically grounded approach to quantify epistemic uncertainty. We begin by introducing a task-agnostic, token-level uncertainty measure defined as the cross-entropy between the predictive distribution of the given model and the unknown true distribution. By decomposing this measure, we isolate the epistemic component and approximate the true distribution by a perfectly prompted, idealized model. We then derive an upper bound for epistemic uncertainty and show that it can be interpreted as semantic feature gaps in the given model's hidden representations relative to the ideal model. We further apply this generic framework to the contextual QA task and hypothesize that three features approximate this gap: context-reliance (using the provided context rather than parametric knowledge), context comprehension (extracting relevant information from context), and honesty (avoiding intentional lies). Using a top-down interpretability approach, we extract these features by using only a small number of labeled samples and ensemble them to form a robust uncertainty score. Experiments on multiple QA benchmarks in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings show that our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised (sampling-free and sampling-based) and supervised UQ methods, achieving up to a 13-point PRR improvement while incurring a negligible inference overhead.
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