用大模型隐含知识提升小样本模型泛化能力,不生成文本也能提取可信先验。
What Language Models Know But Don't Say: Non-Generative Prior Extraction for Generalization
- 通过分析大模型对正反语义的置信度差异,提取特征影响的先验分布。
- 在10个真实数据集上,性能比无先验的模型高59%接近理想模型。
- 方法可复现且高效,适合医疗、金融等数据稀缺领域的小样本建模。
在医疗、金融等领域,大规模标注数据成本高昂且难以获取,导致模型常在小样本数据上训练,难以泛化到真实人群。大型语言模型(LLM)蕴含了这些领域的长期研究知识。本文提出LoID(Logit-Informed Distributions),一种确定性方法,通过直接访问模型在词级别上的预测结果,提取贝叶斯逻辑回归所需的有用先验分布。不同于依赖生成文本的方法,我们通过精心构造的句子,探测模型在正负影响方向上的置信度一致性,从而量化每个特征影响力的强度与可靠性。我们在十组真实表格数据集上评估,采用合成的分布外(OOD)设置,存在协变量偏移(covariate shift),训练数据仅为总体的子集。对比四种基准:(1) 标准非信息先验,(2) AutoElicit(通过文本补全提示生成先验),(3) LLMProcesses(利用上下文学习生成数值预测),(4) 基于完整数据拟合逻辑回归的类奥拉上限。使用曲线下面积(AUC)作为评估指标。结果表明,LoID在所有数据集上显著优于仅基于OOD数据训练的逻辑回归,性能恢复率达奥拉模型的59%。在8/10数据集上优于AutoElicit和LLMProcesses,同时提供可复现、计算高效的机制,将大模型知识融入贝叶斯推断。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In domains like medicine and finance, large-scale labeled data is costly and often unavailable, leading to models trained on small datasets that struggle to generalize to real-world populations. Large language models contain extensive knowledge from years of research across these domains. We propose LoID (Logit-Informed Distributions), a deterministic method for extracting informative prior distributions for Bayesian logistic regression by directly accessing their token-level predictions. Rather than relying on generated text, we probe the model's confidence in opposing semantic directions (positive vs. negative impact) through carefully constructed sentences. By measuring how consistently the LLM favors one direction across diverse phrasings, we extract the strength and reliability of the model's belief about each feature's influence. We evaluate LoID on ten real-world tabular datasets under synthetic out-of-distribution (OOD) settings characterized by covariate shift, where the training data represents only a subset of the population. We compare our approach against (1) standard uninformative priors, (2) AutoElicit, a recent method that prompts LLMs to generate priors via text completions, (3) LLMProcesses, a method that uses LLMs to generate numerical predictions through in-context learning and (4) an oracle-style upper bound derived from fitting logistic regression on the full dataset. We assess performance using Area Under the Curve (AUC). Across datasets, LoID significantly improves performance over logistic regression trained on OOD data, recovering up to \textbf{59\%} of the performance gap relative to the oracle model. LoID outperforms AutoElicit and LLMProcessesc on 8 out of 10 datasets, while providing a reproducible and computationally efficient mechanism for integrating LLM knowledge into Bayesian inference.
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。