EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models

Gabriele Prato, Jerry Huang, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Shagun Sodhani, Sarath Chandar


Abstract
In the age of artificial intelligence, the role of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly central. Despite their growing prevalence, their capacity to consolidate knowledge from different training documents—a crucial ability in numerous applications—remains unexplored. This paper presents the first study examining the capability of LLMs to effectively combine such information within their parameter space. We introduce EpiK-Eval, a novel question-answering benchmark tailored to evaluate LLMs’ proficiency in formulating a coherent and consistent knowledge representation from segmented narratives. Evaluations across various LLMs reveal significant weaknesses in this domain. We contend that these shortcomings stem from the intrinsic nature of prevailing training objectives. Consequently, we advocate for refining the approach towards knowledge consolidation, as it harbors the potential to dramatically improve their overall effectiveness and performance. The findings from this study offer insights for developing more robust and reliable LLMs. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/EpiK-Eval
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.593
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9523–9557
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.593
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.593
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gabriele Prato, Jerry Huang, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Shagun Sodhani, and Sarath Chandar. 2023. EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9523–9557, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
EpiK-Eval: Evaluation for Language Models as Epistemic Models (Prato et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.emnlp-main.593.pdf
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