Cited by 73Speech and dialogue systemsTopic ModelingMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations

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Sun, Weiwei, Shi, Zhengliang, Gao, Shen, Ren, Pengjie, De Rijke, Maarten, Ren, Zhaochun·2023·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Pre-trained language models (LMs) store knowledge in their parameters and can generate informative responses when used in conversational systems. However, LMs suffer from the problem of “hallucination:” they may generate plausible-looking statements that are irrelevant or factually incorrect. To address this problem, we propose a contrastive learning scheme, named MixCL. A novel mixed contrastive objective is proposed to explicitly optimize the implicit knowledge elicitation process of LMs, and thus reduce their hallucination in conversations. We also examine negative sampling strategies of retrieved hard negatives and model-generated negatives. We conduct experiments on Wizard-of-Wikipedia, a public, open-domain knowledge-grounded dialogue benchmark, and assess the effectiveness of MixCL. MixCL effectively reduces the hallucination of LMs in conversations and achieves the highest performance among LM-based dialogue agents in terms of relevancy and factuality. We show that MixCL achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art KB-based approaches while enjoying notable advantages in terms of efficiency and scalability.

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  • Large language models are prone to generate hallucinated content that conflicts with the source or cannot be verified by factual knowledge.

    “Large language models (LLMs), such as Chat-GPT, are prone to generate hallucinations, i.e., content that conflicts with the source or cannot be verified by the factual knowledge.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Meng, C.; Ren, P.; Chen, Z.; Sun, W.; Ren, Z.; Tu, Z.; and de Rijke, M. 2020. DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation. In SIGIR, 1151-1160.

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Authors
Sun, W., Shi, Z., Gao, S., Ren, P., De Rijke, M., & Ren, Z.
Affiliations
Shandong University (CN)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2023-06-26
Volume
37
Issue
11
Pages
13618-13626
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W4382202847
Cited by
69
References
54
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 11
FWCI
12.23
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (61972234, 61902219, 62102234, 62272274, 62202271, 62072279)
  • Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
  • Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2021QF129)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
contrastive learning, hallucination mitigation, pre-trained language models, chatbots, knowledge-grounded dialogue, negative sampling, hard negatives, factuality

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