Zhaochen Hong

Zhaochen Hong, Haofei Yu, Jiaxuan You

Evaluating consistency in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring reliability, particularly in complex, multi-step interactions between humans and LLMs. Traditional self-consistency methods often miss subtle semantic changes in natural language and functional shifts in code or equations, which can accumulate over multiple transformations. To address this, we propose ConsistencyChecker, a tree-based evaluation framework designed to measure consistency through sequences of reversible transformations, including machine translation tasks and AI-assisted programming tasks. In our framework, nodes represent distinct text states, while edges correspond to pairs of inverse operations. Dynamic and LLM-generated benchmarks ensure a fair assessment of the model's generalization ability and eliminate benchmark leakage. Consistency is quantified based on similarity across different depths of the transformation tree. Experiments on eight models from various families and sizes show that ConsistencyChecker can distinguish the performance of different models. Notably, our consistency scores-computed entirely without using WMT paired data-correlate strongly (r > 0.7) with WMT 2024 auto-ranking, demonstrating the validity of our benchmark-free approach. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/consistencychecker.

Xuming Hu, Zhaochen Hong, Chenwei Zhang et al.

Relation extraction (RE) aims to extract potential relations according to the context of two entities, thus, deriving rational contexts from sentences plays an important role. Previous works either focus on how to leverage the entity information (e.g., entity types, entity verbalization) to inference relations, but ignore context-focused content, or use counterfactual thinking to remove the model's bias of potential relations in entities, but the relation reasoning process will still be hindered by irrelevant content. Therefore, how to preserve relevant content and remove noisy segments from sentences is a crucial task. In addition, retained content needs to be fluent enough to maintain semantic coherence and interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel rationale extraction framework named RE2, which leverages two continuity and sparsity factors to obtain relevant and coherent rationales from sentences. To solve the problem that the gold rationales are not labeled, RE2 applies an optimizable binary mask to each token in the sentence, and adjust the rationales that need to be selected according to the relation label. Experiments on four datasets show that RE2 surpasses baselines.