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Factuality Enhanced Language Models for Open-Ended Text Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pretrained language models (LMs) are susceptible to generate text with nonfactual information. In this work, we measure and improve the factual accuracy of large-scale LMs for open-ended text generation. We design the FactualityPrompts test set and metrics to measure the factuality of LM generations. Based on that, we study the factual accuracy of LMs with parameter sizes ranging from 126M to 530B. Interestingly, we find that larger LMs are more factual than smaller ones, although a previous study suggests that larger LMs can be less truthful in terms of misconceptions. In addition, popular sampling algorithms (e.g., top-p) in open-ended text generation can harm the factuality due to the ``uniform randomness'' introduced at every sampling step. We propose the factual-nucleus sampling algorithm that dynamically adapts the randomness to improve the factuality of generation while maintaining quality. Furthermore, we analyze the inefficiencies of the standard training method in learning correct associations between entities from factual text corpus (e.g., Wikipedia). We propose a factuality-enhanced training method that uses TopicPrefix for better awareness of facts and sentence completion as the training objective, which can vastly reduce the factual errors.


BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

A wide variety of NLP applications, such as machine translation, summarization, and dialog, involve text generation. One major challenge for these applications is how to evaluate whether such generated texts are actually fluent, accurate, or effective. In this work, we conceptualize the evaluation of generated text as a text generation problem, modeled using pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models. The general idea is that models trained to convert the generated text to/from a reference output or the source text will achieve higher scores when the generated text is better. We operationalize this idea using BART, an encoder-decoder based pre-trained model, and propose a metric BARTScore with a number of variants that can be flexibly applied in an unsupervised fashion to evaluation of text from different perspectives (e.g.


Graph-based Uncertainty Metrics for Long-form Language Model Generations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved text generation capabilities, but these systems are still known to hallucinate, and granular uncertainty estimation for long-form LLM generations remains challenging. In this work, we propose Graph Uncertainty -- which represents the relationship between LLM generations and claims within them as a bipartite graph and estimates the claim-level uncertainty with a family of graph centrality metrics. Under this view, existing uncertainty estimation methods based on the concept of self-consistency can be viewed as using degree centrality as an uncertainty measure, and we show that more sophisticated alternatives such as closeness centrality provide consistent gains at claim-level uncertainty estimation.Moreover, we present uncertainty-aware decoding techniques that leverage both the graph structure and uncertainty estimates to improve the factuality of LLM generations by preserving only the most reliable claims. Compared to existing methods, our graph-based uncertainty metrics lead to an average of 6.8% relative gains on AUPRC across various long-form generation settings, and our end-to-end system provides consistent 2-4% gains in factuality over existing decoding techniques while significantly improving the informativeness of generated responses.


EduMod-LLM: A Modular Approach for Designing Flexible and Transparent Educational Assistants

Mittal, Meenakshi, Khare, Rishi, Miroyan, Mihran, Mitra, Chancharik, Norouzi, Narges

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the growing use of Large Language Model (LLM)- based Question-Answering (QA) systems in education, it is critical to evaluate their performance across individual pipeline components. In this work, we introduce EduMod-LLM, a modular function-calling LLM pipeline, and present a comprehensive evaluation along three key axes: function calling strategies, retrieval methods, and generative language models. Our framework enables fine-grained analysis by isolating and assessing each component. We benchmark function-calling performance across LLMs, compare our novel structure-aware retrieval method to vector-based and LLM-scoring baselines, and evaluate various LLMs for response synthesis. This modular approach reveals specific failure modes and performance patterns, supporting the development of interpretable and effective educational QA systems. Our findings demonstrate the value of modular function calling in improving system transparency and pedagogical alignment.


Factuality-Aware Alignment for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

This makes SFT less factual as it trains on human-labeled data that may be novel to the LLM. Furthermore, reward functions used in standard RL often inadequately capture factuality and favor longer and more detailed responses, which inadvertently promote hallucination.


Long-form factuality in large language models Jerry Wei 1 Chengrun Y ang 1 Xinying Song 1 Yifeng Lu

Neural Information Processing Systems

To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT -4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE).


MuCPT: Music-related Natural Language Model Continued Pretraining

Tian, Kai, Mao, Yirong, Bi, Wendong, Wang, Hanjie, Wenhui, Que

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models perform strongly on general tasks but remain constrained in specialized settings such as music, particularly in the music-entertainment domain, where corpus scale, purity, and the match between data and training objectives are critical. We address this by constructing a large, music-related natural language corpus (40B tokens) that combines open source and in-house data, and by implementing a domain-first data pipeline: a lightweight classifier filters and weights in-domain text, followed by multi-stage cleaning, de-duplication, and privacy-preserving masking. We further integrate multi-source music text with associated metadata to form a broader, better-structured foundation of domain knowledge. On the training side, we introduce reference-model (RM)-based token-level soft scoring for quality control: a unified loss-ratio criterion is used both for data selection and for dynamic down-weighting during optimization, reducing noise gradients and amplifying task-aligned signals, thereby enabling more effective music-domain continued pretraining and alignment. To assess factuality, we design the MusicSimpleQA benchmark, which adopts short, single-answer prompts with automated agreement scoring. Beyond the benchmark design, we conduct systematic comparisons along the axes of data composition. Overall, this work advances both the right corpus and the right objective, offering a scalable data-training framework and a reusable evaluation tool for building domain LLMs in the music field.


Factuality Enhanced Language Models for Open-Ended Text Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pretrained language models (LMs) are susceptible to generate text with nonfac-tual information. In this work, we measure and improve the factual accuracy of large-scale LMs for open-ended text generation.