In plain words: This review sorts through ways a language model can fix its own mistakes, using feedback from itself or another automatic system instead of a human. It groups the work into three moments: during training, while writing, and after the answer is done.
Abstract · Automatically Correcting Large Language Models: Surveying the landscape of diverse self-correction strategies
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, their efficacy is undermined by undesired and inconsistent behaviors, including hallucination, unfaithful reasoning, and toxic content. A promising approach to rectify these flaws is self-correction, where the LLM itself is prompted or guided to fix problems in its own output. Techniques leveraging automated feedback -- either produced by the LLM itself or some external system -- are of particular interest as they are a promising way to make LLM-based solutions more practical and deployable with minimal human feedback. This paper presents a comprehensive review of this emerging class of techniques. We analyze and taxonomize a wide array of recent work utilizing these strategies, including training-time, generation-time, and post-hoc correction. We also summarize the major applications of this strategy and conclude by discussing future directions and challenges.
Liangming Pan, Michael Saxon, Wenda Xu, Deepak Nathani, Xinyi Wang, William Yang Wang
arXiv:2308.03188 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Aug 6, 2023 · updated Aug 30, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Work in Progress. Version 2