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arXiv · 2503.01695

Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution

Abstract

Improving context faithfulness in large language models is essential for developing trustworthy retrieval augmented generation systems and mitigating hallucinations, especially in long-form question answering (LFQA) tasks or scenarios involving knowledge conflicts. Existing methods either intervene LLMs only at inference without addressing their inherent limitations or overlook the potential for self-improvement. In this paper, we introduce GenDiE (Generate, Discriminate, Evolve), a novel self-evolving framework that enhances context faithfulness through fine-grained sentence-level optimization. GenDiE combines both generative and discriminative training, equipping LLMs with self-generation and self-scoring capabilities to facilitate iterative self-evolution. This supports both data construction for model alignment and score-guided search during inference. Furthermore, by treating each sentence in a response as an independent optimization unit, GenDiE effectively addresses the limitations of previous approaches that optimize at the holistic answer level, which may miss unfaithful details. Experiments on ASQA (in-domain LFQA) and ConFiQA (out-of-domain counterfactual QA) datasets demonstrate that GenDiE surpasses various baselines in both faithfulness and correctness, and exhibits robust performance for domain adaptation.

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Kun Li, Tianhua Zhang, Yunxiang Li, Hongyin Luo, Abdalla Moustafa, Xixin Wu, James Glass, Helen Meng. 2025-03-03. Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01695

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