Bring Your Own Data! Self-Supervised Evaluation for Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Neel Jain; name: Khalid Saifullah; name: Yuxin Wen; name: John Kirchenbauer; name: Manli Shu; name: Aniruddha Saha; name: Micah Goldblum; name: Jonas Geiping; name: Tom Goldstein
Published: 2023-06-23 17:59:09

Abstract: With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ubiquitous deployment
in diverse domains, measuring language model behavior on realistic data is
imperative. For example, a company deploying a client-facing chatbot must
ensure that the model will not respond to client requests with profanity.
Current evaluations approach this problem using small, domain-specific datasets
with human-curated labels. These evaluation sets are often sampled from a
narrow and simplified distribution, and data sources can unknowingly be leaked
into the training set which can lead to misleading evaluations. To bypass these
drawbacks, we propose a framework for self-supervised evaluation of LLMs by
analyzing their sensitivity or invariance to transformations on the input text.
Self-supervised evaluation can directly monitor LLM behavior on datasets
collected in the wild or streamed during live model deployment. We demonstrate
self-supervised evaluation strategies for measuring closed-book knowledge,
toxicity, and long-range context dependence, in addition to sensitivity to
grammatical structure and tokenization errors. When comparisons to similar
human-labeled benchmarks are available, we find strong correlations between
self-supervised and human-supervised evaluations. The self-supervised paradigm
complements current evaluation strategies that rely on labeled data.