Calibrating LLMs with Information-Theoretic Evidential Deep Learning

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission1068 Authors

Keywords: evidential deep learning; information bottleneck; calibration; large language models

TL;DR: This paper introduces an information-theoretic regularization for evidential deep learning, substantially enhancing the calibration of fine-tuned large language models.

Abstract:

Fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) often exhibit overconfidence, particularly when trained on small datasets, resulting in poor calibration and inaccurate uncertainty estimates.
Evidential Deep Learning (EDL), an uncertainty-aware approach, enables uncertainty estimation in a single forward pass, making it a promising method for calibrating fine-tuned LLMs. However, despite its computational efficiency, EDL is prone to overfitting, as its training objective can result in overly concentrated probability distributions.
To mitigate this, we propose regularizing EDL by incorporating an information bottleneck (IB). Our approach IB-EDL suppresses spurious information in the evidence generated by the model and encourages truly predictive information to influence both the predictions and uncertainty estimates. Extensive experiments across various fine-tuned LLMs and tasks demonstrate that IB-EDL outperforms both existing EDL and non-EDL approaches.
By improving the trustworthiness of LLMs, IB-EDL facilitates their broader adoption in domains requiring high levels of confidence calibration.

Primary Area: probabilistic methods (Bayesian methods, variational inference, sampling, UQ, etc.)

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Submission Number: 1068