Cleanse: Uncertainty Estimation Approach Using Clustering-based Semantic Consistency in LLMs
This work addresses the critical issue of hallucinations in LLMs to enhance safety and reliability, though it is incremental as it builds on existing uncertainty estimation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of hallucinations in large language models by proposing Cleanse, a clustering-based uncertainty estimation method that quantifies semantic consistency in hidden embeddings, achieving improved hallucination detection across four LLMs and two QA benchmarks.
Despite the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) across various NLP tasks, hallucinations in LLMs--where LLMs generate inaccurate responses--remains as a critical problem as it can be directly connected to a crisis of building safe and reliable LLMs. Uncertainty estimation is primarily used to measure hallucination levels in LLM responses so that correct and incorrect answers can be distinguished clearly. This study proposes an effective uncertainty estimation approach, \textbf{Cl}ust\textbf{e}ring-based sem\textbf{an}tic con\textbf{s}ist\textbf{e}ncy (\textbf{Cleanse}). Cleanse quantifies the uncertainty with the proportion of the intra-cluster consistency in the total consistency between LLM hidden embeddings which contain adequate semantic information of generations, by employing clustering. The effectiveness of Cleanse for detecting hallucination is validated using four off-the-shelf models, LLaMA-7B, LLaMA-13B, LLaMA2-7B and Mistral-7B and two question-answering benchmarks, SQuAD and CoQA.