Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator

Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang


Abstract
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and their emergent capabilities make LLM a promising reference-free evaluator on the quality of natural language generation, and a competent alternative to human evaluation. However, hindered by the closed-source or high computational demand to host and tune, there is a lack of practice to further calibrate an off-the-shelf LLM-based evaluator towards better human alignment. In this work, we propose AutoCalibrate, a multi-stage, gradient-free approach to automatically calibrate and align an LLM-based evaluator toward human preference. Instead of explicitly modeling human preferences, we first implicitly encompass them within a set of human labels. Then, an initial set of scoring criteria is drafted by the language model itself, leveraging in-context learning on different few-shot examples. To further calibrate this set of criteria, we select the best performers and re-draft them with self-refinement. Our experiments on multiple text quality evaluation datasets illustrate a significant improvement in correlation with expert evaluation through calibration. Our comprehensive qualitative analysis conveys insightful intuitions and observations on the essence of effective scoring criteria.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.237
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2638–2656
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.237
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, and Qi Zhang. 2024. Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2638–2656, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator (Liu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.lrec-main.237.pdf