We present an automatic large language model (LLM) conversion approach that produces uncertainty-aware LLMs capable of estimating uncertainty with every prediction. Our approach is model- and data-agnostic, is computationally-efficient, and does not rely on external models or systems. We evaluate converted models on the selective question answering setting -- to answer as many questions as possible while maintaining a given accuracy, forgoing providing predictions when necessary. As part of our results, we test BERT and Llama 2 model variants on the SQuAD extractive QA task and the TruthfulQA generative QA task. We show that using the uncertainty estimates provided by our approach to selectively answer questions leads to significantly higher accuracy over directly using model probabilities.

我们提出了一种自动化的大语言模型（LLM）转换方法，可以产生能够在每个预测中估计不确定性的具有不确定性感知能力的LLM。我们的方法与模型和数据无关，计算效率高，不依赖外部模型或系统。我们在选择性问答环境下评估了转换模型，即尽可能回答问题同时保持给定的准确性，在必要时放弃提供预测。作为我们结果的一部分，我们在SQuAD抽取式问答任务和TruthfulQA生成式问答任务上测试了BERT和Llama 2模型变体。我们表明，使用我们方法提供的不确定性估计有选择性地回答问题，可以显著提高准确性，相比直接使用模型概率。

基于不确定性的选择性问题回答语言建模