{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/fictitious-synthetic-data-can-improve-llm","title":"Fictitious Synthetic Data Can Improve LLM Factuality via Prerequisite Learning","arxiv_id":"2410.19290","date":"2024-10-25","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yujian Liu","Shiyu Chang","Tommi Jaakkola","Yang Zhang"],"abstract":"Recent studies have identified one aggravating factor of LLM hallucinations as the knowledge inconsistency between pre-training and fine-tuning, where unfamiliar fine-tuning data mislead the LLM to fabricate plausible but wrong outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy called Prereq-Tune to address this knowledge inconsistency and reduce hallucinations. Fundamentally, Prereq-Tune disentangles the learning of skills and knowledge, so the model learns only the task skills without being impacted by the knowledge inconsistency. To achieve this, Prereq-Tune introduces an additional prerequisite learning stage to learn the necessary knowledge for SFT, allowing subsequent SFT to focus only on task skills. Prereq-Tune can also be combined with fictitious synthetic data to enhance the grounding of LLM outputs to their internal knowledge. Experiments show that Prereq-Tune outperforms existing baselines in improving LLM's factuality across short QA and long-form generation tasks. It also opens new possibilities for knowledge-controlled generation in LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Prereq_tune.git.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19290v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.19290v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"fictitious-synthetic-data-can-improve-llm","repo_url":"https://github.com/ucsb-nlp-chang/prereq_tune","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"},{"method_slug":"sft","method_name":"SFT"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2410.19290","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.19290","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}