Reformulating Domain Adaptation of Large Language Models as Adapt-Retrieve-Revise: A Case Study on Chinese Legal Domain
This addresses the challenge of domain adaptation for LLMs in specialized areas like law, where hallucinations hinder practical use, though it is incremental as it builds on existing retrieval and adaptation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 when applied to specific domains such as Chinese law, by introducing an adapt-retrieve-revise framework that improves accuracy by 33.3% compared to direct GPT-4 generation in zero-shot legal tasks.
While large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have recently demonstrated astonishing zero-shot capabilities in general domain tasks, they often generate content with hallucinations in specific domains such as Chinese law, hindering their application in these areas. This is typically due to the absence of training data that encompasses such a specific domain, preventing GPT-4 from acquiring in-domain knowledge. A pressing challenge is that it's not plausible to continue training LLMs of such scale on in-domain data. This paper introduces a simple and effective domain adaptation framework for GPT-4 by reformulating generation as an \textbf{adapt-retrieve-revise} process. The initial step is to \textbf{adapt} an affordable 7B LLM to the target domain by continuing learning on in-domain data. When solving a task, we leverage the adapted LLM to generate a draft answer given a task query. Then, the draft answer will be used to \textbf{retrieve} supporting evidence candidates from an external in-domain knowledge base. Finally, the draft answer and retrieved evidence are concatenated into a whole prompt to let GPT-4 assess the evidence and \textbf{revise} the draft answer to generate the final answer. Our proposal combines the advantages of the efficiency of adapting a smaller 7B model with the evidence-assessing capability of GPT-4 and effectively prevents GPT-4 from generating hallucinatory content. In the zero-shot setting of four Chinese legal tasks, our method improves accuracy by 33.3\% compared to the direct generation by GPT-4. When compared to two stronger retrieval-based baselines, our method outperforms them by 15.4\% and 23.9\%. Our code will be released