In plain words: Telling a language model to write as if quoting text it has read, like a journalist citing sources, keeps it closer to real facts. Measured by how much of its answers appear word-for-word in source texts, grounding improved and task accuracy often rose too.
Abstract · "According to ...": Prompting Language Models Improves Quoting from Pre-Training Data
Large Language Models (LLMs) may hallucinate and generate fake information, despite pre-training on factual data. Inspired by the journalistic device of "according to sources", we propose according-to prompting: directing LLMs to ground responses against previously observed text. To quantify this grounding, we propose a novel evaluation metric (QUIP-Score) that measures the extent to which model-produced answers are directly found in underlying text corpora. We illustrate with experiments on three corpora (Wikipedia, PubMed, and the U.S. legal tax code) that these prompts improve grounding under our metrics, with the additional benefit of often improving end-task performance. Furthermore, prompts that ask the model to decrease grounding (or to ground to other corpora) indeed decrease QUIP-Score, indicating the ability of LLMs to increase or decrease grounded generations on request.
Orion Weller, Marc Marone, Nathaniel Weir, Dawn Lawrie, Daniel Khashabi, Benjamin Van Durme
arXiv:2305.13252 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted May 22, 2023 · updated Feb 26, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to EACL 2024