Automatically Correcting Large Language Models: Surveying the landscape of diverse self-correction strategies (2308.03188v2)

Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, their efficacy is undermined by undesired and inconsistent behaviors, including hallucination, unfaithful reasoning, and toxic content. A promising approach to rectify these flaws is self-correction, where the LLM itself is prompted or guided to fix problems in its own output. Techniques leveraging automated feedback -- either produced by the LLM itself or some external system -- are of particular interest as they are a promising way to make LLM-based solutions more practical and deployable with minimal human feedback. This paper presents a comprehensive review of this emerging class of techniques. We analyze and taxonomize a wide array of recent work utilizing these strategies, including training-time, generation-time, and post-hoc correction. We also summarize the major applications of this strategy and conclude by discussing future directions and challenges.

Automatically Correcting LLMs: A Survey of Diverse Self-Correction Strategies

The research paper "Automatically Correcting LLMs: Surveying the Landscape of Diverse Self-Correction Strategies" provides an extensive review of existing techniques aimed at addressing inherent flaws in LLMs. Given the rapid adoption and application of LLMs across various NLP tasks, there is a critical need to overcome issues such as hallucinations, unfaithful reasoning, and the generation of toxic content that can undermine their reliability and trustworthiness.

Self-Correction Strategies Overview

The paper categorizes self-correction strategies into three primary types: training-time correction, generation-time correction, and post-hoc correction. Each approach leverages automated feedback—either from the models themselves or external systems, without relying heavily on human intervention.

1. Training-Time Correction: This pre-hoc strategy aims to rectify LLM errors during the training phase. It can involve direct optimization using human feedback, the use of reward models in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), or self-training methods that improve models by bootstrapping their own outputs.
2. Generation-Time Correction: This approach utilizes feedback during the generation process, guiding the model as it produces output. Techniques include the generate-then-rank strategy where multiple candidate outputs are evaluated to select the best one, and feedback-guided decoding that uses step-level feedback to steer generation processes.
3. Post-hoc Correction: Operating after the generation phase, post-hoc correction involves refining outputs without updating model parameters. Strategies here include self-refinement, utilizing external tools and models for feedback, and multi-agent debate where multiple LLMs interact to negotiate and refine outputs collectively.

Implications and Future Directions

The paper outlines the practicality and theoretical implications of the self-correction strategies, emphasizing their importance in making LLM-based solutions more deployable with minimal human oversight. By enabling models to self-correct via automated feedback mechanisms, there is potential for these models to more effectively adapt to diverse applications ranging from factual correction and reasoning tasks to code synthesis and machine translation.

The paper proposes several future research directions:

• Theoretical Exploration: Understanding the underlying principles of self-correction in LLMs, including their metacognitive abilities and calibration in self-evaluation.
• Measurement and Evaluation: Developing metrics to gauge the effectiveness of self-correction strategies and devising benchmarks to diagnose these capabilities.
• Continual Self-Improvement: Investigating how LLMs can continually self-correct and improve over time, akin to life-long learning processes.
• Integration with Model Editing and Multi-Modality: Exploring how model editing can facilitate self-correction and extend strategies to multi-modal settings for broader applicability.

Conclusion

This paper presents a foundational framework for enhancing the reliability of LLMs, positioning self-correction as a viable path toward aligning these models more closely with human demands in real-world applications. As the field progresses, the insights and categorizations from this paper serve as a crucial resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to optimize LLM performance through strategic correction interventions.