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  1. Title: Towards Uncertainty Aware Language Agent
  2. Author: Jiuzhou Han et. al.
  3. Publish Year: 30 May 2024
  4. Review Date: Thu, Jun 20, 2024
  5. url: arXiv:2401.14016v3

Summary of paper

image-20240620111719451

Motivation

  • The existing approaches neglect the notion of uncertainty during these interactions

Contribution

Some key terms

Related work 1: lang agent

  • the author define what is language agent and discuss it – the prominent work of ReAct propose a general language agent framework to combine reasoning and acting with LLMs for solving diverse language reasoning tasks.
  • continue the track of ReAct – introducing Reflexion, use the history failure trials as input to ask for reflection and can gain better results
  • FireAct – add more diverse fine-tuning data to improve the performance

Later the author mention Toolformer, Gorilla and other lang agent that is not start from ReAct

Related work 2: uncertainty in generation with LLMs

  • author mentioned some common practice in leveraging uncertainty during lang generation – via sampling or decoding which do not measure uncertainty directly, but rather they rely on the stochasticity over prediction space along with a form of aggregation approach such as majority voting.
  • then the author talked about Consistency – a sampling method which takes majority voting over multiple sampling outputs. then they refer readers to a paper For a comprehensive review of sampling and decoding methods in NLG.
  • the author stated that “We focus on leveraging uncertainty estimation in free-form QA with short answers. Uncertainty estimation in free-form NLG remains a challenge for LLMs due to the diversity of the outputs.”
  • then the author give the category of how to do uncertainty estimation in NLG:
    • logits or entropy based methods
    • prompt based methods
    • all the sections are provided with detailed info about previous work on these methods of uncertainty estimation

Results

image-20240620140555156

image-20240620140616339