To enhance Large Language Models' (LLMs) reliability, calibration is essential -- the model's assessed confidence scores should align with the actual likelihood of its responses being correct. However, current confidence elicitation methods and calibration metrics typically rely on a binary true/false assessment of response correctness. This approach does not apply to long-form generation, where an answer can be partially correct. Addressing this gap, we introduce a unified calibration framework, in which both the correctness of the LLMs' responses and their associated confidence levels are treated as distributions across a range of scores. Within this framework, we develop three metrics to precisely evaluate LLM calibration and further propose two confidence elicitation methods based on self-consistency and self-evaluation. Our experiments, which include long-form QA and summarization tasks, demonstrate that larger models don't necessarily guarantee better calibration, that calibration performance is found to be metric-dependent, and that self-consistency methods excel in factoid datasets. We also find that calibration can be enhanced through techniques such as fine-tuning, integrating relevant source documents, scaling the temperature, and combining self-consistency with self-evaluation. Lastly, we showcase a practical application of our system: selecting and cascading open-source models and ChatGPT to optimize correctness given a limited API budget. This research not only challenges existing notions of LLM calibration but also offers practical methodologies for improving trustworthiness in long-form generation.

通过引入统一的校准框架，以及发展三种度量和两种置信度引导方法，提高大规模语言模型的校准能力，并进行了实验验证，进一步展示了大型模型不一定保证更好的校准，校准性能依赖于度量，自一致性方法在基准数据集上表现优异，通过微调、整合相关源文件、缩放温度、将自一致性与自我评估相结合等技术可以提高校准性，此研究不仅挑战了现有大规模语言模型校准的概念，还提供了改善长文生成可信度的实用方法。

从大型语言模型中校正长文生成