Learn PromptingIntroduction
This chapter covers how to make completions more reliable, as well as how to implement checks to ensure that outputs are reliable.
To a certain extent, most of the previous techniques covered have to do with improving completion accuracy, and thus reliability, in particular self-consistency. However, there are a number of other techniques that can be used to improve reliability, beyond basic prompting strategies.
LLM have been found to be more reliable than we might expect at interpreting what a prompt is trying to say when responding to misspelled, badly phrased, or even actively misleading prompts. Despite this ability, they still exhibit various problems including hallucinations, flawed explanations with CoT prompting methods, and multiple biases including majority label bias, recency bias, and common token bias. Additionally, zero-shot CoT can be particularly biased when dealing with sensitive topics.
Common solutions to some of these problems include calibrators to remove a priori biases, and verifiers to score completions, as well as promoting diversity in completions.
Sander Schulhoff
Sander Schulhoff is the Founder of Learn Prompting and an ML Researcher at the University of Maryland. He created the first open-source Prompt Engineering guide, reaching 3M+ people and teaching them to use tools like ChatGPT. Sander also led a team behind Prompt Report, the most comprehensive study of prompting ever done, co-authored with researchers from the University of Maryland, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Princeton, Stanford, and other leading institutions. This 76-page survey analyzed 1,500+ academic papers and covered 200+ prompting techniques.
Calibrating LLMs
🟢 Prompt Debiasing
🟦 Prompt Ensembling
🟦 LLM Self Evaluation
🟦 Math
Footnotes
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Wang, X., Wei, J., Schuurmans, D., Le, Q., Chi, E., Narang, S., Chowdhery, A., & Zhou, D. (2022). Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models. ↩
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Webson, A., Loo, A. M., Yu, Q., & Pavlick, E. (2023). Are Language Models Worse than Humans at Following Prompts? It’s Complicated. arXiv:2301.07085v1 [Cs.CL]. ↩
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Ye, X., & Durrett, G. (2022). The Unreliability of Explanations in Few-shot Prompting for Textual Reasoning. ↩ ↩2
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Zhao, T. Z., Wallace, E., Feng, S., Klein, D., & Singh, S. (2021). Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models. ↩
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Shaikh, O., Zhang, H., Held, W., Bernstein, M., & Yang, D. (2022). On Second Thought, Let’s Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning. ↩