给大模型推理过程加时间感知的置信度评估,防幻觉更准
Recurrent Confidence Chain: Temporal-Aware Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models
- 用跨步骤注意力捕捉推理链语义关联,避免遗漏低信心环节
- 引入隐藏置信机制保留历史信心,使整体置信度更真实
- 在高考数学和因果推理任务上表现优于现有方法
作为推理模块的大语言模型(如思维链)在常识问答和数学求解等任务中表现优异。当前主要挑战是评估答案的不确定性,以防止误导性或严重幻觉。现有方法通过过滤无关标记并分析邻近标记/句子间关系来处理长推理序列,但常忽略置信度的时间传播特性,导致整体置信度被高估,即使早期步骤信心极低。为此,我们提出一种新方法,通过引入跨步骤注意力分析各步间的语义相关性;针对长时序响应,设计隐藏置信机制以保留历史置信信息,并将其与逐步置信度融合,实现更准确的整体置信估计。我们在GAOKAO数学基准和CLadder因果推理数据集上,使用主流开源大语言模型进行评估。结果表明,该方法在预测质量与校准性之间取得更优平衡,负对数似然(Negative Log-Likelihood)和期望校准误差(Expected Calibration Error)均优于当前最优方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As reasoning modules, such as the chain-of-thought mechanism, are applied to large language models, they achieve strong performance on various tasks such as answering common-sense questions and solving math problems. The main challenge now is to assess the uncertainty of answers, which can help prevent misleading or serious hallucinations for users. Although current methods analyze long reasoning sequences by filtering unrelated tokens and examining potential connections between nearby tokens or sentences, the temporal spread of confidence is often overlooked. This oversight can lead to inflated overall confidence, even when earlier steps exhibit very low confidence. To address this issue, we propose a novel method that incorporates inter-step attention to analyze semantic correlations across steps. For handling long-horizon responses, we introduce a hidden confidence mechanism to retain historical confidence information, which is then combined with stepwise confidence to produce a more accurate overall estimate. We evaluate our method on the GAOKAO math benchmark and the CLadder causal reasoning dataset using mainstream open-source large language models. Our approach is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods by achieving a superior balance between predictive quality and calibration, demonstrated by strong performance on both Negative Log-Likelihood and Expected Calibration Error.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。