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Halo: Estimation and Reduction of Hallucinations in Open-Source Weak LLMs (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on Aug 29, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A lightweight test measures how often a small open-source chatbot invents facts, without needing outside knowledge or peeking inside the model. Feeding it extra facts and letting a bigger model teach it cut those made-up answers in tough topics.

Abstract · Halo: Estimation and Reduction of Hallucinations in Open-Source Weak Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP). Although convenient for research and practical applications, open-source LLMs with fewer parameters often suffer from severe hallucinations compared to their larger counterparts. This paper focuses on measuring and reducing hallucinations in BLOOM 7B, a representative of such weaker open-source LLMs that are publicly available for research and commercial applications. We introduce HaloCheck, a lightweight BlackBox knowledge-free framework designed to quantify the severity of hallucinations in LLMs. Additionally, we explore techniques like knowledge injection and teacher-student approaches to alleviate hallucinations in low-parameter LLMs. Our experiments effectively demonstrate the reduction of hallucinations in challenging domains for these LLMs.

Mohamed Elaraby, Mengyin Lu, Jacob Dunn, Xueying Zhang, Yu Wang, Shizhu Liu, Pingchuan Tian, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang
arXiv:2308.11764 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Aug 22, 2023 · updated Sep 13, 2023
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