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Do Large Language Models Perform the Way People Expect? Measuring the Human Generalization Function

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arxiv 2406.01382 v1 pith:ICDB5MOY submitted 2024-06-03 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords peoplefunctiongeneralizationhumanmodelsevaluatewhatbeliefs
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What makes large language models (LLMs) impressive is also what makes them hard to evaluate: their diversity of uses. To evaluate these models, we must understand the purposes they will be used for. We consider a setting where these deployment decisions are made by people, and in particular, people's beliefs about where an LLM will perform well. We model such beliefs as the consequence of a human generalization function: having seen what an LLM gets right or wrong, people generalize to where else it might succeed. We collect a dataset of 19K examples of how humans make generalizations across 79 tasks from the MMLU and BIG-Bench benchmarks. We show that the human generalization function can be predicted using NLP methods: people have consistent structured ways to generalize. We then evaluate LLM alignment with the human generalization function. Our results show that -- especially for cases where the cost of mistakes is high -- more capable models (e.g. GPT-4) can do worse on the instances people choose to use them for, exactly because they are not aligned with the human generalization function.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

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