Jia Chen

Tiejin Chen, Xiaoou Liu, Longchao Da et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks due to large training datasets and powerful transformer architecture. However, the reliability of responses from LLMs remains a question. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) of LLMs is crucial for ensuring their reliability, especially in areas such as healthcare, finance, and decision-making. Existing UQ methods primarily focus on semantic similarity, overlooking the deeper knowledge dimensions embedded in responses. We introduce a multi-dimensional UQ framework that integrates semantic and knowledge-aware similarity analysis. By generating multiple responses and leveraging auxiliary LLMs to extract implicit knowledge, we construct separate similarity matrices and apply tensor decomposition to derive a comprehensive uncertainty representation. This approach disentangles overlapping information from both semantic and knowledge dimensions, capturing both semantic variations and factual consistency, leading to more accurate UQ. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques in identifying uncertain responses, offering a more robust framework for enhancing LLM reliability in high-stakes applications.

Chen Jia

Bootstrapping large language models (LLMs) through preference-based policy optimization offers a promising direction for aligning model behavior with human preferences without relying on extensive manual annotations. In this work, we propose a novel preference-based policy optimization (PbPO) framework that formulates the learning process as a min-max game between the main policy and a reward model (RM). The RM is constrained within a confidence set derived from preference data to ensure reliable exploitation. Our iterative online algorithm actively collects preference data through guided exploration of the evolving policy, enabling continual self-improvement of both the policy and the RM. We provide theoretical guarantees for our method, establishing high-probability regret bounds for both settings with sequence-level RM and token-level RM, demonstrating its effectiveness in bootstrapping LLMs. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art preference optimization techniques.