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Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by Lerc on Sunday July 23, 2023 @08:46PM (#36841654)
It is not a good start that they begin with a dictionary definition of Hallucinations. While the similarities to what a LLM does are apparent enough for the term to be used, LLMs are under no obligation to behave similar to the dictionary definition of Hallucinations.

In general facts are not the answer to Hallucinations. You can't possibly have every fact for every situation. The true solution to Hallucinations is figuring out how to make a model say 'I don't know"

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by ddmma on Sunday July 23, 2023 @08:53PM (#36841711)
You cannot fix what you cannot measure, here is an attempt to do just that with HallMeter https://why.network/

Still have to figure a measurement unit.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by anon25783 on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:20AM (#36844121)
How about "falsehood quotient"? Count the number of counterfactual assertions in a given text, then divide by the number of sentences. Of course, the question of what is a falsehood is an exercise for the reader, but this would at least give a unit of measurement, flawed as it is.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by janalsncm on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:41AM (#36844283)
The “exercise for the reader” in this case is the entire point of the metric. If it were possible to do at scale it could be incorporated into existing models right now.

Second, it isn’t even necessarily better to have fewer lies if those few lies are more subtle. Plenty of propaganda works by twisting facts and using misleading statements. Perhaps the worst offenders won’t even have any outright falsehoods at all.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by ddmma on Monday July 24, 2023 @06:06AM (#36845376)
that is very interesting input, thanks! Also split into sentences, similar to what sentiment analytics does would raise the level of complexity into the output metric.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by lqhl on Sunday July 23, 2023 @09:43PM (#36842072)
This article suggests that LLMs should use a database as a reference for factual information. Rather than asking LLMs to provide their own answers, it is recommended that they summarize based on the facts extracted from the database. This approach reduces the likelihood of hallucinations among LLMs.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by teej on Sunday July 23, 2023 @09:55PM (#36842170)
> This approach reduces the likelihood of hallucinations among LLMs.

This has not been my experience. Did you create any benchmarks as a part of this project?

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by lqhl on Sunday July 23, 2023 @10:24PM (#36842402)
This idea is a simplified version of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and RAG has been studied in various research papers, such as the one available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by npsomaratna on Sunday July 23, 2023 @11:52PM (#36842945)
My experience with RAG is that while it reduces the incidence of hallucinations* significantly (especially if you reduce the LLM temperature to zero at the same time), it doesn't eliminate them.

My startup has a product for lawyers that uses RAG to answer legal queries (https://lawlight.ai/). We have a disclaimer that "... (we) do not guarantee the accuracy of answers. You are responsible for reviewing the cited case law and drawing your own independent conclusions."

(This works within the specific context—lawyers are domain experts; and they are supposed to read through all cases they cite in court anyway.)

* I dislike the term "hallucinations." By definition LLMs hallucinate. It's just that much (or most) of the time, the hallucinations reflect reality.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by 3cats-in-a-coat on Sunday July 23, 2023 @11:54PM (#36842954)
We already had databases of facts, like Wolfram Alpha, decades before LLM, and we largely ignored them. It's ironic that when trying to solve AI problems we keep reverting to these old patterns we've tried since the 80s and they kept failing. Habits die hard, I guess.

There's a categorical difference between knowing a fact, and looking up a fact. When you know a fact you can recognize it in a situation where you wouldn't know to look it up, and you'd know to utilize it in a larger solution rather than simply parrot it when specifically asked about it.

Databases of facts have and will still have their place, but that is absolutely not the solution to LLM telling apart fact from truth. They have to innately have this in their model. I don't believe the nature of LLM is to hallucinate. It's instead a side effect of how we train them. We train them to guess, to be close, but not to be correct necessarily. And why is it a surprise that's precisely what they do?

Also LLM are too small in order to be accurate. They're tiny. GPT4 is roughly 40 times smaller than a human brain. And GPT4 is very large compared to GPT-3, and GPT-3 is very large compared to LLaMA 2.

We'll need for hardware to catch up so we can scale things up pragmatically and see what happens to their ability to grasp facts. But also architectural changes, of course.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by kfrzcode on Monday July 24, 2023 @04:05AM (#36844445)
Not to mention our wetbrain software is analog, resonant with the environment, continuous and has a single uptime, in most cases. We should consider developing llms in proto human history style, random noise meets environs, evolve useful signs and symbols based on clusters of semantic embedding. Uno reverse it through a dynamic parallel narrative simulator circuit with range of values for interpretative feedback of context analysis. Assign allomorphic symbols to conceptual clusters. Refine resolution. Add modules for memory and inputs for updating knowledge, shine it up with some polish and you've got AGI
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by prometheus76 on Monday July 24, 2023 @09:28AM (#36847665)
Larger models are not always more accurate. Overbuilding a model often leads to "overfitting" the dataset. A good example: the iphone text prediction model. It now has so much data that the suggested completed words are often useless and irrelevant in context.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by mjburgess on Monday July 24, 2023 @09:36AM (#36847775)
> I don't believe the nature of LLM is to hallucinate. It's instead a side effect of how we train them. We train them to guess, to be close, but not to be correct necessarily.

Thoughout this comment you speak about LLMs as-if they're animals, or real physical objects. An LLM is a formal model which is just to generate a sequence of tokens maximally probabilistically consistent with a corpus of historical text.

A digital machine running a LLM program is a physical object which necessarily generates text based on "guessing" because that's the algorithm it's running. LLMs are "guessing algorithms", all of Machine Learning is -- it is dumb brute-force analysis of conditional probability.

> GPT4 is roughly 40 times smaller than a human brain

This doesn't make any sense. GPT4 is an abstract algorithm with no "size". The brain has 10^{big number} cells, and GPT4 can be specified with a single real number. Is that the comparison to make? No, both comparisons are incoherent.

A physical device running GPT4 can be given a "size", but it would again have nothing to do with a brain.

LLMs arent living things where we can "measure their size" and "train them to know, rather than to guess". They are just the equation, `max P(answer|propmt, historical_corpus)`

A machine running GPT4 is just an electrical device generating text according to the rule given above. There is no sense of "training it to do something other than guesswork", and no sense of "size"

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by quickthrower2 on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:59AM (#36844410)
This are assuming LLMs are intelligent and can think "hey I am dumb, I'll look that up".

What they are literally doing is guessing the next word, a word a time but doing it really really well and making statistically average output over a very large number of inputs.

There is no distinction between understanding "the" vs "a" and telling me 1+1=3. It is all token generation.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by kfrzcode on Monday July 24, 2023 @04:11AM (#36844485)
Isn't this a serious simplification? Tokens are just the medium
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by astrange on Monday July 24, 2023 @05:25AM (#36845040)
What they are doing depends entirely on what decoding algorithm you use. An LLM is mostly a token probability function, but it's not just that - a transformer model is capable of learning anything. Tokens are the interface, not necessarily the implementation.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by FishInTheWater on Monday July 24, 2023 @07:35AM (#36846191)
A transformer can only memorize, it doesn't learn to do.

For what that concerns us here: LLMs will never learn to fact-check anything. They'll blindly regurgitate the facts they have been "taught", but never consider or evaluate "the paper cited for this fact on wikipedia is a bunch of bullshit".

Any attempt to use them to produce "facts" is ultimately just folly, in the same way Google's attempt to do so with it's search engine index is.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by ajross on Monday July 24, 2023 @09:56AM (#36848057)
> [LLMs] never consider or evaluate "the paper cited for this fact on wikipedia is a bunch of bullshit".

Nor do people, though! This is setting the bar way too high.

The whole point to having edited reference sources like "encyclopedias" is that so that we can rely on the expertise of the editors in lieu of having to develop the expertise ourselves[1].

No, an LLM that simply knows a priori (via prompt hacking) which sources are trustworthy would be absolutely comparable to the way an educated-but-non-expert human approaches sources.

[1] Which is a chicken and egg problem anyway. Everyone starts with edited reference sources as tutorial material. Quite frankly everyone starts learning with wikipedia.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by FishInTheWater on Monday July 24, 2023 @10:13AM (#36848332)
This is setting the bar way too high.

No. If these things are claimed to be sources of truth, then the bar needs to be that high.

It is precisely because people don't fact-check that the bar has to be so high.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by ajross on Monday July 24, 2023 @10:50AM (#36848975)
> If these things are claimed to be sources of truth

That's a strawman, though. No service, nor human, "claims to be a source of truth" in the kind of profound sense you seem to be using. It stops, everywhere, at "Wikipedia (or whatever) said it and I trust it".

The only way to get access to deeper expertise is to (1) BE an expert and (2) engage in an discussion with another.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by astrange on Monday July 24, 2023 @10:43AM (#36848859)
No, a transformer is a universal function approximator and is capable of learning to do anything to some degree of accuracy.

GPT doesn't do math correctly but it also doesn't just memorize it.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by prometheus76 on Monday July 24, 2023 @09:30AM (#36847699)
It seems to me that LLMs are basically an algorithmic encoding of Occam's Razor. The issue seems to be that what is most probable does not always correspond to what happens, or what makes the most sense to an embodied person.

What is most probable is not always what is most correct or most accurate.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by SkyPuncher on Monday July 24, 2023 @10:24AM (#36848480)
This blog is only having an LLM assess what column it should run a query against.

Why is that necessary? Why have an LLM guess where the facts are?

Put all of that data in a place where it's normalized and ready to vector search.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by s1mon on Sunday July 23, 2023 @11:49PM (#36842931)
"Hallucination" makes it sound like ChatGPT drank some of the punch without realizing it was laced with LSD. "Bullshit" sounds more like what comes out of an overconfident ass who should or could know better with some better education.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by delecti on Sunday July 23, 2023 @11:56PM (#36842969)
Hallucination is a better descriptor for what an LLM is doing though. A bullshitter knows they don't know, an LLM just strings words together in ways that fit what it "saw" from training data. IMO the main problem with calling them hallucinations is the implication that the true things they say are true on purpose. It's hallucinating the true things too.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by mdp2021 on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:52AM (#36844371)
Exactly, but no, there should be no «implication that the true things they» output are not part of that: required modules for foundational thinking (let us say "critical thinking") are missing.

(Issue is, now some are convinced that people in general would do the same and just blurt out the feedforward output of their "internal neural network", as opposed to having built knowledge in a loop of critical evaluation.)

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by ImHereToVote on Monday July 24, 2023 @06:45AM (#36845718)
In Swedish the term for perception and misapprehension is the same word. Because it is the same thing.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by rsynnott on Monday July 24, 2023 @08:10AM (#36846630)
_Both_ are an inappropriate degree of anthropomorphism IMO.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by balnaphone on Monday July 24, 2023 @02:51AM (#36843924)
"Confabulation" is the correct and precise term that comports with the English language, rather than being jargon requiring a neologism.
Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by mdp2021 on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:42AM (#36844287)
> "Confabulation"

And why would that be? "Hallucination" means "erratic wandering", implying one is lost - similarly to "delirium" (maetaphor using the plough) and "error". Part of the idea is that of "instead of witnessing the correct, reporting the false" - a very ancient, traditional idea, and akin to the concept of "intelligence" (intus-legere).

"Confabulation" means locutor and interlocutor are talking, exchanging narrations.

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by codetrotter on Monday July 24, 2023 @04:25AM (#36844578)
> In psychology, confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. It is generally associated with certain types of brain damage (especially aneurysm in the anterior communicating artery) or a specific subset of dementias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

Re:Teach your LLM to answer with facts, not fiction by mdp2021 on Monday July 24, 2023 @04:40AM (#36844690)
Interesting, I will check that more analytically as soon as I will be back at the console,

but I am not sure - provisionally - that it can be a good idea to relate strictly human neurology to ANNs, if based on phenomena as opposed to structural issues. You do not have issue when staying with natural language.