Papers › Know the Unknown: An Uncertainty-Sensitive Method for LLM Instruction Tuning

Know the Unknown: An Uncertainty-Sensitive Method for LLM Instruction Tuning

14 Jun 2024arXiv:2406.10099archive 2025-07-28

Jiaqi Li, Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but still face challenges such as hallucinations. One potential reason for hallucinations is the lack of relevant knowledge or context. Thus, a promising solution involves instructing LLMs to respond with "I do not know" when a question falls outside their knowledge domain or the provided context. However, in this work, we observed that LLMs struggle to admit their lack of knowledge, primarily due to existing instruction datasets designed to encourage specific answers. To improve models' capability to recognize the boundaries of their knowledge, we propose a novel approach called uncertainty-sensitive tuning. This method involves two-stage training designed for uncertainty recognition and prompt-sensitive activation. In the first stage, we guide the LLM to reject unknown questions. In the second stage, we force the model to follow the instructions by incorporating designed causal instructions. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed uncertainty-sensitive tuning method enhance the model's ability to identify areas of uncertainty. Specifically, it achieves a substantial improvement of up to 34.7% in handling questions involving knowledge gaps compared to the original model. Moreover, our finetuned models even outperform GPT-4, exhibiting an overall performance improvement of up to 4.2%.

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