Shawn Wang: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yes. I mean, you are kind of famous now, you know, that's fine. Just to dive in more into biases and, you know, some of this is like statistical control. The classic one for human preference evaluation is humans demonstrably prefer longer contexts or longer outputs, which is actually something that we don't necessarily want. You guys, I think maybe two months ago put out some length control studies. Apart from that, there are just other documented biases. Like, I'd just be interested in your review of what you've learned about biases and maybe a little bit about how you've controlled for them. At a very high level, yeah. Humans are biased. Totally agree. Like in various ways. It's not clear whether that's good or bad, you know, we try not to make value judgments about these things. We just try to describe them as they are. And our approach is always as follows. We collect organic data and then we take that data and we mine it to get whatever insights we can get. And, you know, we have many millions of data points that we can now use to extract insights from. Now, one of those insights is to ask the question, what is the effect of style, right? You have a bunch of data, you have votes, people are voting either which way. We have all the conversations. We can say what components of style contribute to human preference and how do they contribute? Now, that's an important question. Why is that an important question? It's important because some people want to see which model would be better if the lengths of the responses were the same, were to be the same, right? People want to see the causal effect of the model's identity controlled for length or controlled for markdown, number of headers, bulleted lists, is the text bold? Some people don't, they just don't care about that. The idea is not to impose the judgment that this is not important, but rather to say ex post facto, can we analyze our data in a way that decouples all the different factors that go into human preference? Now, the way we do this is via statistical regression. That is to say the arena score that we show on our leaderboard is a particular type of linear model, right? It's a linear model that takes, it's a logistic regression that takes model identities and fits them against human preference, right? So it regresses human preference against model identity. What you get at the end of that logistic regression is a parameter vector of coefficients. And when the coefficient is large, it tells you that GPT 4.0 or whatever, very large coefficient, that means it's strong. And that's exactly what we report in the table. It's just the predictive effect of the model identity on the vote. The other thing that you can do is you can take that vector, let's say we have M models, that is an M dimensional vector of coefficients. What you can do is you say, hey, I also want to understand what the effect of length is. So I'll add another entry to that vector, which is trying to predict the vote, right? That tells me the difference in length between two model responses. So we have that for all of our data. We can compute it ex post facto. We added it into the regression and we look at that predictive effect. And then the idea, and this is formally true under certain conditions, not always verifiable ones, but the idea is that adding that extra coefficient to this vector will kind of suck out the predictive power of length and put it into that M plus first coefficient and quote, unquote, de-bias the rest so that the effect of length is not included. And that's what we do in style control.…

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