Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) sometimes suffer from producing hallucinations, especially LLMs may generate untruthful responses despite knowing the correct knowledge. Activating the truthfulness within LLM is the key to fully unlocking LLM’s knowledge potential. In this paper, we propose TruthX, an inference-time intervention method to activate the truthfulness of LLM by identifying and editing the features within LLM’s internal representations that govern the truthfulness. TruthX employs an auto-encoder to map LLM’s representations into semantic and truthful latent spaces respectively, and applies contrastive learning to identify a truthful editing direction within the truthful space. During inference, by editing LLM’s internal representations in truthful space, TruthX effectively enhances the truthfulness of LLM. Experiments show that TruthX improves the truthfulness of 13 advanced LLMs by an average of 20% on TruthfulQA benchmark. Further analyses suggest that TruthX can control LLM to produce truthful or hallucinatory responses via editing only one vector in LLM’s internal representations.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.acl-long.483
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8908–8949
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.483
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Shaolei Zhang, Tian Yu, and Yang Feng. 2024. TruthX: Alleviating Hallucinations by Editing Large Language Models in Truthful Space. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8908–8949, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TruthX: Alleviating Hallucinations by Editing Large Language Models in Truthful Space (Zhang et al., ACL 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.acl-long.483.pdf