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arXiv · 2412.19513

Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs

Zhe Yang·Yichang Zhang·Yudong Wang·Ziyao Xu·Junyang Lin·Zhifang Sui
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Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) can correct their self-generated responses, but a decline in accuracy after self-correction is also witnessed. To have a deeper understanding of self-correction, we endeavor to decompose, evaluate, and analyze the self-correction behaviors of LLMs. By enumerating and analyzing answer correctness before and after self-correction, we decompose the self-correction capability into confidence (being confident to correct answers) and critique (turning wrong answers to correct) capabilities, and propose two metrics from a probabilistic perspective to measure these 2 capabilities, along with another metric for overall self-correction capability evaluation. Based on our decomposition and evaluation metrics, we conduct extensive experiments and draw some empirical conclusions. For example, we find different models can exhibit distinct behaviors: some models are confident while others are more critical. We also find the trade-off between the two capabilities (i.e. improving one can lead to a decline in the other) when manipulating model self-correction behavior by prompts or in-context learning. Further, we find a simple yet efficient strategy to improve self-correction capability by transforming Supervision Fine-Tuning (SFT) data format, and our strategy outperforms vanilla SFT in both capabilities and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.

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Zhe Yang, Yichang Zhang, Yudong Wang, Ziyao Xu, Junyang Lin, Zhifang Sui. 2024-12-27. Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19513

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