2022

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

Kadavath, Saurav, Conerly, Tom, Askell, Amanda et al.

Understand

We study whether language models can evaluate the validity of their own claims and predict which questions they will be able to answer correctly.

  • We first show that larger models are well-calibrated on diverse multiple choice and true/false questions when they are provided in the right format.
  • Thus we can approach self-evaluation on open-ended sampling tasks by asking models to first propose answers, and then to evaluate the probability "P(True)" that their answers are correct.
  • We find encouraging performance, calibration, and scaling for P(True) on a diverse array of tasks.

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