FACTS Grounding: A new benchmark for evaluating the factuality of large language models

Our complete benchmark and on-line leaderboard supply a much-needed measure of how precisely LLMs floor their responses in offered supply materials and keep away from hallucinations

Giant language fashions (LLMs) are remodeling how we entry info, but their grip on factual accuracy stays imperfect. They will “hallucinate” false info, notably when given complicated inputs. In flip, this could erode belief in LLMs and restrict their functions in the actual world.

At this time, we’re introducing FACTS Grounding, a complete benchmark for evaluating the power of LLMs to generate responses that aren’t solely factually correct with respect to given inputs, but additionally sufficiently detailed to offer passable solutions to consumer queries.

We hope our benchmark will spur industry-wide progress on factuality and grounding. To trace progress, we’re additionally launching the FACTS leaderboard on Kaggle. We’ve already examined main LLMs utilizing FACTS Grounding and have populated the preliminary leaderboard with their grounding scores. We’ll preserve and replace the leaderboard as the sector advances.

FACTS Grounding dataset

To precisely consider the factuality and grounding of any given LLM, the FACTS Grounding dataset contains 1,719 examples, every fastidiously crafted to require long-form responses grounded within the context doc offered. Every instance contains a doc, a system instruction requiring the LLM to completely reference the offered doc, and an accompanying consumer request.

All examples are divided right into a “public” set (860) and a “personal” (859) held out set. We’re releasing the public set immediately so anybody can use it to guage an LLM. After all, we all know that problems with benchmark contamination and leaderboard hacking are vital to guard towards, so following customary {industry} observe, we’re maintaining the personal analysis set held out. The FACTS leaderboard scores are the typical efficiency throughout each private and non-private units.

To make sure a range of inputs, the FACTS Grounding examples embrace paperwork with quite a lot of lengths, as much as a most of 32,000 tokens (roughly 20,000 phrases), protecting domains comparable to finance, expertise, retail, drugs, and regulation. The consumer requests are equally vast ranging, together with requests for summarization, Q&A technology, and rewriting duties. We didn’t embrace any examples that would require creativity, arithmetic, or complicated reasoning – capabilities which could require the mannequin to use extra superior reasoning along with grounding.

Collective judgement by main LLMs

To succeed on a given instance, an LLM should synthesize the complicated info within the doc and generate a long-form response that’s each a complete reply to the consumer request and totally attributable to that doc.

FACTS Grounding evaluates mannequin responses routinely utilizing three frontier LLM judges — particularly Gemini 1.5 Professional, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We chosen a mixture of various judges to mitigate any potential bias of a choose giving greater scores to the responses produced by a member of its personal mannequin household. The automated choose fashions have been comprehensively evaluated towards a held-out take a look at set to seek out the perfect performing judging immediate templates and to confirm settlement with human raters.

Every FACTS Grounding instance is judged in two phases. First, responses are evaluated for eligibility, and disqualified in the event that they don’t sufficiently deal with the consumer’s request. Second, responses are judged as factually correct if they’re totally grounded in info contained within the offered doc, with no hallucinations.

With the eligibility and grounding accuracy of a given LLM response evaluated individually by a number of AI choose fashions, the outcomes are then aggregated to find out if the LLM has handled the instance efficiently. The ultimate rating for the general grounding job is the typical of all choose fashions’ scores throughout all examples. Discover extra particulars of our FACTS Grounding analysis methodology in our paper.

FACTS Grounding will proceed to evolve

We’re aware that benchmarks might be shortly overtaken by progress, so this launch of our FACTS Grounding benchmark and leaderboard is just the start. Factuality and grounding are among the many key components that can form the long run success and usefulness of LLMs and broader AI programs, and we purpose to develop and iterate FACTS Grounding as the sector progresses, regularly elevating the bar.

We encourage the AI group to engage with FACTS Grounding, consider their fashions on the open set of examples or to submit their fashions for analysis. We consider that complete benchmarking strategies, coupled with steady analysis and growth will proceed to enhance AI programs.