Conference Talk 16: A Deep Dive on LLM Evaluation

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In this talk, Hailey Schoelkopf from Eleuther AI provides an overview of the challenges in LLM evaluation, exploring different measurement techniques, highlighting reproducibility issues, and advocating for best practices like sharing evaluation code and using task-specific downstream evaluations.
Author

Christian Mills

Published

August 29, 2024

This post is part of the following series:
  • Mastering LLMs Course Notes: My notes from the course Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists by Hamel Husain and Dan Becker.
Presentation Slides

Introduction

  • Speaker: Hailey Schoelkopf, Research Scientist at Eleuther AI
  • Topic: Deep dive into the challenges and best practices of Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation.

About the Speaker

  • Hailey Schoelkopf:
    • Research Scientist at Eleuther AI.
    • Maintainer of the LM Evaluation Harness, a widely used open-source library for evaluating LLMs.

About Eleuther AI:

  • Website: https://eleuther.ai/
  • Project Page: Evaluating LLMs
  • Non-profit research lab known for:
    • Releasing open-source LLMs like GPT-J and GPT-NeoX-20B.
    • Research on:
      • Model Interpretability
      • Datasets
      • Distributed Training
      • LLM Evaluation
    • Building and maintaining tools for the open-source AI ecosystem.

LM Evaluation Harness

  • GitHub Repository: https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness
  • Purpose:
    • Originally created to reproduce and track the evaluations from the GPT-3 paper.
    • Evolved into a comprehensive library for evaluating LLMs.
  • Usage:
    • Widely used by researchers and practitioners.
    • Powers the backend for the OpenLLM Leaderboard.

Challenges in LLM Evaluation

1. Scoring Difficulties

  • Core Issue: Reliably evaluating the correctness of LLM responses in natural language.
  • Challenges:
    • Subjectivity of Language: What constitutes a “correct” response can be subjective and context-dependent.
    • Hallucination: LLMs can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect information, making it challenging to determine accuracy based on surface-level analysis.
    • Lack of Standardized Metrics: Absence of universally agreed-upon metrics for evaluating LLM performance across different tasks and domains.

2. Reproducibility Issues

  • Importance: Ensuring that evaluation results are consistent and replicable.
  • Challenges:
    • Sensitivity to Implementation Details: LLM performance can vary significantly based on seemingly minor differences in implementation, such as tokenization, prompt formatting, and hyperparameters.
    • Lack of Transparency: Limited sharing of evaluation code and detailed methodologies makes it difficult for others to reproduce results.
    • Data Set Variability: Differences in data set composition and quality can lead to inconsistent evaluations.

Common LLM Evaluation Methods

1. Log Likelihoods: Assessing the Probability of Expected Outputs

  • Background:

    • LLMs output a probability distribution over vocabulary for each possible next token.
    • This distribution represents the model’s confidence in different words following the given input.

  • How It Works:

    • Input: A prompt (X) and a potential output (Y).

    • Process: Calculate the probability of the model generating Y given X. This involves summing the log probabilities of each token in Y, conditioned on the preceding tokens in X and Y.

      • \[ \log P(y|x) = \sum_{i=0}^{m-1} \log p(y_i | x, y_0, \ldots, y_{i-1}) = \sum_{i=0}^{m-1} l(n+i, y_{i}) \]

      • where \(\log p(y_i | x, y_0, \ldots, y_{i-1})\) is the log probability of the \(i\)-th target token conditioned on the full input \(x\) and the preceding target tokens. (and where \(x, y_0, \ldots, y_{i-1}\) denotes conditioning on only \(x\).).

    • Example: For the prompt “The cow jumped over the,” calculate the probability of the model generating “moon” versus other words.

  • Use Case: Multiple Choice Question Answering

    • Advantages:
      • Computationally cheaper than generation-based evaluation.
      • Avoids issues with parsing errors in generated text.
      • Suitable for evaluating smaller LLMs or those in early training stages.
    • Disadvantages:
      • Limited real-world applicability compared to open-ended generation.
      • Doesn’t assess a model’s ability to formulate its own answers.
      • Cannot evaluate chain-of-thought reasoning.

  • Challenges with Log Likelihoods and Perplexity:

    • Tokenizer Sensitivity: Metrics are affected by the specific tokenizer used, making comparisons between models with different tokenizers difficult.
      • Solution: Implement normalization techniques to account for tokenizer variations.
    • Limited Information: Log likelihoods only consider the probability of a given output, not its overall quality, coherence, or factual accuracy.

2. Perplexity: Measuring How Well a Model Fits a Data Distribution

  • Concept: Quantifies how well a language model predicts a given text, indicating its familiarity with the data distribution.

  • Calculation: Based on the average per-token log probability of the text, with lower perplexity indicating a better fit to the data.

    • \[ \text{PPL} = \exp \left( -\frac{1}{\sum_{j=1}^{|D|} N_j} \sum_{j=1}^{|D|} \sum_{i=1}^{N_j} \log P(y_{ji} | y_{j1}, \ldots, y_{ji-1}) \right) \]

  • Use Case: Evaluating a model’s understanding of a specific text corpus (e.g., Wikipedia).

  • Limitations:

    • Domain Specificity: Perplexity on one dataset (e.g., Wikipedia) may not generalize to other domains or tasks.
    • Limited Insight into Downstream Performance: A low perplexity doesn’t guarantee good performance in real-world applications like chatbots or question answering.

3. Text Generation: Evaluating Real-World Output but Facing Scoring Challenges

  • Importance: Crucial for assessing LLMs in tasks involving text generation (e.g., chatbots, story writing).
  • Challenges:
    • Scoring Free-Form Text: Determining the correctness and quality of generated text is difficult.
      • Simple heuristics (e.g., keyword matching) are unreliable and prone to gaming.
      • Human evaluation is expensive and time-consuming.
      • LLM-based judges introduce their own biases and limitations.
    • Sensitivity to Prompt Details: Minor variations in prompts (e.g., trailing whitespace) can drastically impact results, hindering reproducibility.
      • Example: In code generation, a trailing tab in the prompt can create syntax errors for models that generate code with specific formatting, leading to artificially lower performance scores.

The Need for Reproducibility and Best Practices

  • Reproducibility is Crucial: Ensuring that evaluation results can be independently verified is essential for:
    • Fair Model Comparisons: Accurately assessing the relative performance of different LLMs.
    • Meaningful Progress Tracking: Tracking improvements in model development and evaluation methods.
  • Challenges to Reproducibility:
    • Lack of standardized evaluation practices and metrics.
    • Incomplete reporting of evaluation details (e.g., prompts, code, evaluation settings).
  • Best Practices for Reproducible LLM Evaluation:
    • Share Evaluation Code: Publicly release code used for evaluation to allow for scrutiny and replication of results.
    • Detailed Reporting: Provide comprehensive information about evaluation procedures, including:
      • Specific prompts and instructions given to models.
      • Data preprocessing steps and evaluation datasets used.
      • Evaluation metrics and their calculation.
    • Use Standardized Evaluation Frameworks: Leverage libraries like the lm-evaluation-harness or other tools (Helm, OpenCompass) to promote consistency and reduce implementation discrepancies.
  • Distinction Between Model Evals and Downstream Evals:

Conclusion

  • Implementation Details Matter: LLMs are highly sensitive to minor variations in evaluation procedures.
  • Transparency and Standardization are Key: Sharing code, detailed reporting, and using standardized frameworks are crucial for reproducible LLM evaluation.
  • Prioritize Downstream Evaluations: Focus on evaluations that directly measure performance in your specific application context.
  • For Further Exploration:

Q&A Highlights:

  • Dataset Quality: Errors or biases in benchmark datasets can significantly affect evaluation results and limit the usefulness of benchmarks.
  • Overfitting to Evaluations: Repeatedly optimizing for a specific benchmark can lead to overfitting, where models excel on the benchmark but fail to generalize to other tasks or data.
  • Measurement Validity: It’s essential to ensure that evaluation metrics accurately measure the desired aspects of LLM performance (e.g., factual accuracy, reasoning, coherence).
  • LLMs as Judges:
    • Benefits: LLMs can potentially automate the evaluation of tasks requiring nuanced understanding and reasoning, which are difficult to assess with simple heuristics.
    • Considerations:
      • Judge Model Selection: Carefully choose an LLM judge that possesses the necessary capabilities for the task being evaluated.
      • Judge Model Limitations: Be aware of the judge model’s own biases and limitations, as these can influence the evaluation outcomes.
  • Reliable Multiple-Choice Answers Without Additional Text:
    • Structured Generation: Use techniques that constrain the model’s output to specific formats.
    • System Prompts: Provide clear instructions to the model to only output the answer.
    • Log Likelihoods: Rely on log likelihood-based multiple-choice evaluations if structured generation isn’t possible.
About Me:
  • I’m Christian Mills, a deep learning consultant specializing in computer vision and practical AI implementations.
  • I help clients leverage cutting-edge AI technologies to solve real-world problems.
  • Learn more about me or reach out via email at [email protected] to discuss your project.