4 ms·
To a large extent both "hallucinations" and "plagiarism" can be addressed with the same training method: source-aware training. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.0101
by DoctorOetker 9mo ago
To a large extent both "hallucinations" and "plagiarism" can be addressed with the same training method: source-aware training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01019 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01019
At the frontier of science we have speculations, which until proper measurements become possible, are unknown to be true or false (or even unknown to be equivalent with other speculations etc. regardless of their being true or false, or truer or falser). Once settled we may call earlier but wrong speculations as "reasonable wrong guesses". In science it is important that these guesses or suspicions are communicated as it drives the design of future experiments.
I argue that more important that "eliminating hallucinations" is tracing the reason it is or was believed by some.
With source-aware training we can ask an LLM to give answers to a question (which may contradict each other), but to provide the training-source(s) justifying emission of each answer, instead of bluff it could emit multiple interpretations and go like:
> answer A: according to school of thought A the answer is that ... examples of authors and places in my training set are: author+title a1, a2, a3, ...
> answer B: according to author B: the answer to this question is ... which can be seen in articles b1, b2
> answer ...: ...
> answer F: although I can't find a single document explaining this, when I collate the observation x in x1, x2, x3; observation y in y1,y2, ... , observation z in z1, z2, ... then I conclude the following: ...
so it is clear which statements are sourced where, and which deductions are proper to the LLM.
Obviously few to none of the high profile LLM providers will do this any time soon, because when jurisdictions learn this is possible they will demand all models to be trained source-aware, so that they can remunerate the authors in their jurisdiction (and levy taxes on their income). What fraction of the income will then go to authors and what fraction to the LLM providers? If any jurisdiction would be first to enforce this, it would probably be the EU, but they don't do it yet. If models are trained in a different jurisdiction than the one levying taxes the academic in-group citation game will be extended to LLMs: a US LLM will have incentive to only cite US sources when multiple are available, and a EU trained LLM will prefer to selectively cite european sources, etc.
- hodgehog11 9mo agoI wasn't aware of source-aware training, so thank you for the reference! It does seem a bit too good to be true; I believe in a system of tradeoffs so I feel like this must have an issue with reducing creativity. That's at first glance though, so I could be wrong.
- rickydroll 9mo agoIn addition to providing training sources, it's important to identify overlaps among the fragments used in the answer. For me, overlap doesn't mean simply identical expression, but conceptually identical. We are much more likely to find conceptual overlap in code than in language and prose because Many of the problems we solve, as mathematicians say, reduce to previously solved problems, which IMO means substantially identical code. A related question is how much change is necessary to a work of art, image, prose, or code for it to escape copyright? If we can characterize it and the LLM generates something that escapes copyright, I suggest the output should be excluded from future copyright or patent claims.