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Context-Faithful Prompting for Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by r_singh on Apr 3, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Two no-training prompting tricks make language models trust the given text over their memorized facts: ask what a narrator thinks of the passage, and show examples containing false facts. On two language tasks, models followed the given context far more often than standard prompts.

Abstract · Context-faithful Prompting for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) encode parametric knowledge about world facts and have shown remarkable performance in knowledge-driven NLP tasks. However, their reliance on parametric knowledge may cause them to overlook contextual cues, leading to incorrect predictions in context-sensitive NLP tasks (e.g., knowledge acquisition tasks). In this paper, we seek to assess and enhance LLMs' contextual faithfulness in two aspects: knowledge conflict and prediction with abstention. We demonstrate that LLMs' faithfulness can be significantly improved using carefully designed prompting strategies. In particular, we identify opinion-based prompts and counterfactual demonstrations as the most effective methods. Opinion-based prompts reframe the context as a narrator's statement and inquire about the narrator's opinions, while counterfactual demonstrations use instances containing false facts to improve faithfulness in knowledge conflict situations. Neither technique requires additional training. We conduct experiments on three datasets of two standard NLP tasks, machine reading comprehension and relation extraction, and the results demonstrate significant improvement in faithfulness to contexts. Code and data are released at https://github.com/wzhouad/context-faithful-llm.

Wenxuan Zhou, Sheng Zhang, Hoifung Poon, Muhao Chen
arXiv:2303.11315 · cs.CL · submitted Mar 20, 2023 · updated Oct 23, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at EMNLP 2023 Findings. Code and data are released at https://github.com/wzhouad/context-faithful-llm

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