Utilize the Flow before Stepping into the Same River Twice: Certainty Represented Knowledge Flow for Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning

Understand

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions.

• By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as "I don't know", RAIT enhances the reliability of LLMs and reduces their hallucination.
• Generally, RAIT modifies training samples based on the correctness of the initial LLM's response.
• However, this crude approach can cause LLMs to excessively refuse answering questions they could have correctly answered, the problem we call over-refusal.