Open-Domain Text Evaluation via Contrastive Distribution Methods

Abstract: Recent advancements in open-domain text generation, driven by the power of large pre-trained LLMs, have demonstrated remarkable performance. However, assessing these models' generation quality remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for evaluating open-domain text generation called Contrastive Distribution Methods (CDM). Leveraging the connection between increasing model parameters and enhanced LLM performance, CDM creates a mapping from the contrast of two probabilistic distributions -- one known to be superior to the other -- to quality measures. We investigate CDM for open-domain text generation evaluation under two paradigms: 1) Generative CDM, which harnesses the contrast of two LLMs' distributions to generate synthetic examples for training discriminator-based metrics; 2) Discriminative CDM, which directly uses distribution disparities between two LLMs for evaluation. Our experiments on coherence evaluation for multi-turn dialogue and commonsense evaluation for controllable generation demonstrate CDM's superior correlate with human judgment than existing automatic evaluation metrics, highlighting the strong performance and generalizability of our approach.