Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses
FreeBenchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to detect errors in their own responses.
About Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses
ReaLMistake is the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to detect errors in their own responses. It comprises three challenging tasks covering four distinct error categories: reasoning correctness, instruction-following, context-faithfulness, and parameterized knowledge. The benchmark uses objectively assessable errors naturally occurring in GPT-4 and Llama 2 70B outputs, annotated by experts. The paper evaluates 12 LLM-based error detectors and finds that even top models like GPT-4 and Claude 3 achieve very low recall, perform much worse than humans, produce unreliable explanations, are sensitive to prompt changes, and are not improved by self-consistency or majority vote. The benchmark and associated code are publicly available.
Key Features
Pros & Cons
- First benchmark focusing on objective, realistic, and diverse LLM errors
- Covers multiple error types that are practically relevant
- Uses expert annotations for high-quality ground truth
- Provides code and benchmark for reproducibility
- Published at COLM 2024, indicating academic rigor
- Current LLM error detectors perform much worse than humans
- Even top models like GPT-4 and Claude 3 have very low recall
- LLMs produce unreliable explanations for detected errors
- Performance is sensitive to small prompt changes
- Popular techniques like self-consistency and majority vote do not improve detection