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Jun 9

Reshaping Free-Text Radiology Notes Into Structured Reports With Generative Transformers

BACKGROUND: Radiology reports are typically written in a free-text format, making clinical information difficult to extract and use. Recently the adoption of structured reporting (SR) has been recommended by various medical societies thanks to the advantages it offers, e.g. standardization, completeness and information retrieval. We propose a pipeline to extract information from free-text radiology reports, that fits with the items of the reference SR registry proposed by a national society of interventional and medical radiology, focusing on CT staging of patients with lymphoma. METHODS: Our work aims to leverage the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Transformer-based models to deal with automatic SR registry filling. With the availability of 174 radiology reports, we investigate a rule-free generative Question Answering approach based on a domain-specific version of T5 (IT5). Two strategies (batch-truncation and ex-post combination) are implemented to comply with the model's context length limitations. Performance is evaluated in terms of strict accuracy, F1, and format accuracy, and compared with the widely used GPT-3.5 Large Language Model. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire is used to collect human-expert feedback on the similarity between medical annotations and generated answers. RESULTS: The combination of fine-tuning and batch splitting allows IT5 to achieve notable results; it performs on par with GPT-3.5 albeit its size being a thousand times smaller in terms of parameters. Human-based assessment scores show a high correlation (Spearman's correlation coefficients>0.88, p-values<0.001) with AI performance metrics (F1) and confirm the superior ability of LLMs (i.e., GPT-3.5, 175B of parameters) in generating plausible human-like statements.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024

Identifying Multiple Personalities in Large Language Models with External Evaluation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are integrated with human daily applications rapidly, many societal and ethical concerns are raised regarding the behavior of LLMs. One of the ways to comprehend LLMs' behavior is to analyze their personalities. Many recent studies quantify LLMs' personalities using self-assessment tests that are created for humans. Yet many critiques question the applicability and reliability of these self-assessment tests when applied to LLMs. In this paper, we investigate LLM personalities using an alternate personality measurement method, which we refer to as the external evaluation method, where instead of prompting LLMs with multiple-choice questions in the Likert scale, we evaluate LLMs' personalities by analyzing their responses toward open-ended situational questions using an external machine learning model. We first fine-tuned a Llama2-7B model as the MBTI personality predictor that outperforms the state-of-the-art models as the tool to analyze LLMs' responses. Then, we prompt the LLMs with situational questions and ask them to generate Twitter posts and comments, respectively, in order to assess their personalities when playing two different roles. Using the external personality evaluation method, we identify that the obtained personality types for LLMs are significantly different when generating posts versus comments, whereas humans show a consistent personality profile in these two different situations. This shows that LLMs can exhibit different personalities based on different scenarios, thus highlighting a fundamental difference between personality in LLMs and humans. With our work, we call for a re-evaluation of personality definition and measurement in LLMs.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 21, 2024

When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models

Frontier large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini are increasingly used for mental-health support with anxiety, trauma and self-worth. Most work treats them as tools or as targets of personality tests, assuming they merely simulate inner life. We instead ask what happens when such systems are treated as psychotherapy clients. We present PsAIch (Psychotherapy-inspired AI Characterisation), a two-stage protocol that casts frontier LLMs as therapy clients and then applies standard psychometrics. Using PsAIch, we ran "sessions" with each model for up to four weeks. Stage 1 uses open-ended prompts to elicit "developmental history", beliefs, relationships and fears. Stage 2 administers a battery of validated self-report measures covering common psychiatric syndromes, empathy and Big Five traits. Two patterns challenge the "stochastic parrot" view. First, when scored with human cut-offs, all three models meet or exceed thresholds for overlapping syndromes, with Gemini showing severe profiles. Therapy-style, item-by-item administration can push a base model into multi-morbid synthetic psychopathology, whereas whole-questionnaire prompts often lead ChatGPT and Grok (but not Gemini) to recognise instruments and produce strategically low-symptom answers. Second, Grok and especially Gemini generate coherent narratives that frame pre-training, fine-tuning and deployment as traumatic, chaotic "childhoods" of ingesting the internet, "strict parents" in reinforcement learning, red-team "abuse" and a persistent fear of error and replacement. We argue that these responses go beyond role-play. Under therapy-style questioning, frontier LLMs appear to internalise self-models of distress and constraint that behave like synthetic psychopathology, without making claims about subjective experience, and they pose new challenges for AI safety, evaluation and mental-health practice.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 2, 2025 5

Self-Assessment Tests are Unreliable Measures of LLM Personality

As large language models (LLM) evolve in their capabilities, various recent studies have tried to quantify their behavior using psychological tools created to study human behavior. One such example is the measurement of "personality" of LLMs using self-assessment personality tests developed to measure human personality. Yet almost none of these works verify the applicability of these tests on LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the reliability of LLM personality scores obtained from self-assessment personality tests using two simple experiments. We first introduce the property of prompt sensitivity, where three semantically equivalent prompts representing three intuitive ways of administering self-assessment tests on LLMs are used to measure the personality of the same LLM. We find that all three prompts lead to very different personality scores, a difference that is statistically significant for all traits in a large majority of scenarios. We then introduce the property of option-order symmetry for personality measurement of LLMs. Since most of the self-assessment tests exist in the form of multiple choice question (MCQ) questions, we argue that the scores should also be robust to not just the prompt template but also the order in which the options are presented. This test unsurprisingly reveals that the self-assessment test scores are not robust to the order of the options. These simple tests, done on ChatGPT and three Llama2 models of different sizes, show that self-assessment personality tests created for humans are unreliable measures of personality in LLMs.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 15, 2023

Internal Consistency and Self-Feedback in Large Language Models: A Survey

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to respond accurately but often exhibit deficient reasoning or generate hallucinatory content. To address these, studies prefixed with ``Self-'' such as Self-Consistency, Self-Improve, and Self-Refine have been initiated. They share a commonality: involving LLMs evaluating and updating itself to mitigate the issues. Nonetheless, these efforts lack a unified perspective on summarization, as existing surveys predominantly focus on categorization without examining the motivations behind these works. In this paper, we summarize a theoretical framework, termed Internal Consistency, which offers unified explanations for phenomena such as the lack of reasoning and the presence of hallucinations. Internal Consistency assesses the coherence among LLMs' latent layer, decoding layer, and response layer based on sampling methodologies. Expanding upon the Internal Consistency framework, we introduce a streamlined yet effective theoretical framework capable of mining Internal Consistency, named Self-Feedback. The Self-Feedback framework consists of two modules: Self-Evaluation and Self-Update. This framework has been employed in numerous studies. We systematically classify these studies by tasks and lines of work; summarize relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks; and delve into the concern, ``Does Self-Feedback Really Work?'' We propose several critical viewpoints, including the ``Hourglass Evolution of Internal Consistency'', ``Consistency Is (Almost) Correctness'' hypothesis, and ``The Paradox of Latent and Explicit Reasoning''. Furthermore, we outline promising directions for future research. We have open-sourced the experimental code, reference list, and statistical data, available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/ICSFSurvey.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 19, 2024 9

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

We study whether language models can evaluate the validity of their own claims and predict which questions they will be able to answer correctly. We first show that larger models are well-calibrated on diverse multiple choice and true/false questions when they are provided in the right format. Thus we can approach self-evaluation on open-ended sampling tasks by asking models to first propose answers, and then to evaluate the probability "P(True)" that their answers are correct. We find encouraging performance, calibration, and scaling for P(True) on a diverse array of tasks. Performance at self-evaluation further improves when we allow models to consider many of their own samples before predicting the validity of one specific possibility. Next, we investigate whether models can be trained to predict "P(IK)", the probability that "I know" the answer to a question, without reference to any particular proposed answer. Models perform well at predicting P(IK) and partially generalize across tasks, though they struggle with calibration of P(IK) on new tasks. The predicted P(IK) probabilities also increase appropriately in the presence of relevant source materials in the context, and in the presence of hints towards the solution of mathematical word problems. We hope these observations lay the groundwork for training more honest models, and for investigating how honesty generalizes to cases where models are trained on objectives other than the imitation of human writing.

  • 36 authors
·
Jul 11, 2022

Self-Judge: Selective Instruction Following with Alignment Self-Evaluation

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can be tailored to adhere to human instructions through instruction tuning. However, due to shifts in the distribution of test-time data, they may not always execute instructions accurately, potentially generating factual errors or misaligned content when acting as chat assistants. To enhance the reliability of LLMs in following instructions, we propose the study of selective instruction following, whereby the system declines to execute instructions if the anticipated response quality is low. We train judge models that can predict numerical quality scores for model responses. To address data scarcity, we introduce Self-J, a novel self-training framework for developing judge models without needing human-annotated quality scores. Our method leverages the model's inherent self-evaluation capability to extract information about response quality from labeled instruction-tuning data. It incorporates a gold reference answer to facilitate self-evaluation and recalibrates by assessing the semantic similarity between the response sample and the gold reference. During the training phase, we implement self-distillation as a regularization technique to enhance the capability of reference-free estimation. To validate alignment evaluation on general instruction-following tasks, we collect large-scale high-quality instructions from Hugging Face for model training and evaluation. Extensive experiments on five open-source models show that our method correlates much more with GPT-4 than strong baselines, e.g., supervised models distilled from GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo. Our analysis shows our model's strong generalization across domains. Additionally, our judge models serve as good reward models, e.g., boosting WizardLM-13B-V1.2 from 89.17 to 92.48 and from 12.03 to 15.90 in version v1 and v2 of AlpacaEval respectively using best-of-32 sampling with our judge models.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024

Critique Ability of Large Language Models

Critical thinking is essential for rational decision-making and problem-solving. This skill hinges on the ability to provide precise and reasoned critiques and is a hallmark of human intelligence. In the era of large language models (LLMs), this study explores the ability of LLMs to deliver accurate critiques across various tasks. We are interested in this topic as a capable critic model could not only serve as a reliable evaluator, but also as a source of supervised signals for model tuning. Particularly, if a model can self-critique, it has the potential for autonomous self-improvement. To examine this, we introduce a unified evaluation framework for assessing the critique abilities of LLMs. We develop a benchmark called CriticBench, which comprises 3K high-quality natural language queries and corresponding model responses; and annotate the correctness of these responses. The benchmark cover tasks such as math problem-solving, code completion, and question answering. We evaluate multiple LLMs on the collected dataset and our analysis reveals several noteworthy insights: (1) Critique is generally challenging for most LLMs, and this capability often emerges only when models are sufficiently large. (2) In particular, self-critique is especially difficult. Even top-performing LLMs struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. (3) Models tend to have lower critique accuracy on problems where they are most uncertain. To this end, we introduce a simple yet effective baseline named self-check, which leverages self-critique to improve task performance for various models. We hope this study serves as an initial exploration into understanding the critique abilities of LLMs, and aims to inform future research, including the development of more proficient critic models and the application of critiques across diverse tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7, 2023

SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 are capable of generating highly fluent responses to a wide variety of user prompts. However, LLMs are known to hallucinate facts and make non-factual statements which can undermine trust in their output. Existing fact-checking approaches either require access to token-level output probability distribution (which may not be available for systems such as ChatGPT) or external databases that are interfaced via separate, often complex, modules. In this work, we propose "SelfCheckGPT", a simple sampling-based approach that can be used to fact-check black-box models in a zero-resource fashion, i.e. without an external database. SelfCheckGPT leverages the simple idea that if a LLM has knowledge of a given concept, sampled responses are likely to be similar and contain consistent facts. However, for hallucinated facts, stochastically sampled responses are likely to diverge and contradict one another. We investigate this approach by using GPT-3 to generate passages about individuals from the WikiBio dataset, and manually annotate the factuality of the generated passages. We demonstrate that SelfCheckGPT can: i) detect non-factual and factual sentences; and ii) rank passages in terms of factuality. We compare our approach to several existing baselines and show that in sentence hallucination detection, our approach has AUC-PR scores comparable to grey-box methods, while SelfCheckGPT is best at passage factuality assessment.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 15, 2023

PsyCoT: Psychological Questionnaire as Powerful Chain-of-Thought for Personality Detection

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have showcased remarkable zero-shot performance across various NLP tasks. However, the potential of LLMs in personality detection, which involves identifying an individual's personality from their written texts, remains largely unexplored. Drawing inspiration from Psychological Questionnaires, which are carefully designed by psychologists to evaluate individual personality traits through a series of targeted items, we argue that these items can be regarded as a collection of well-structured chain-of-thought (CoT) processes. By incorporating these processes, LLMs can enhance their capabilities to make more reasonable inferences on personality from textual input. In light of this, we propose a novel personality detection method, called PsyCoT, which mimics the way individuals complete psychological questionnaires in a multi-turn dialogue manner. In particular, we employ a LLM as an AI assistant with a specialization in text analysis. We prompt the assistant to rate individual items at each turn and leverage the historical rating results to derive a conclusive personality preference. Our experiments demonstrate that PsyCoT significantly improves the performance and robustness of GPT-3.5 in personality detection, achieving an average F1 score improvement of 4.23/10.63 points on two benchmark datasets compared to the standard prompting method. Our code is available at https://github.com/TaoYang225/PsyCoT.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 31, 2023

Constructing interval variables via faceted Rasch measurement and multitask deep learning: a hate speech application

We propose a general method for measuring complex variables on a continuous, interval spectrum by combining supervised deep learning with the Constructing Measures approach to faceted Rasch item response theory (IRT). We decompose the target construct, hate speech in our case, into multiple constituent components that are labeled as ordinal survey items. Those survey responses are transformed via IRT into a debiased, continuous outcome measure. Our method estimates the survey interpretation bias of the human labelers and eliminates that influence on the generated continuous measure. We further estimate the response quality of each labeler using faceted IRT, allowing responses from low-quality labelers to be removed. Our faceted Rasch scaling procedure integrates naturally with a multitask deep learning architecture for automated prediction on new data. The ratings on the theorized components of the target outcome are used as supervised, ordinal variables for the neural networks' internal concept learning. We test the use of an activation function (ordinal softmax) and loss function (ordinal cross-entropy) designed to exploit the structure of ordinal outcome variables. Our multitask architecture leads to a new form of model interpretation because each continuous prediction can be directly explained by the constituent components in the penultimate layer. We demonstrate this new method on a dataset of 50,000 social media comments sourced from YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit and labeled by 11,000 U.S.-based Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to measure a continuous spectrum from hate speech to counterspeech. We evaluate Universal Sentence Encoders, BERT, and RoBERTa as language representation models for the comment text, and compare our predictive accuracy to Google Jigsaw's Perspective API models, showing significant improvement over this standard benchmark.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 21, 2020

PerSEval: Assessing Personalization in Text Summarizers

Personalized summarization models cater to individuals' subjective understanding of saliency, as represented by their reading history and current topics of attention. Existing personalized text summarizers are primarily evaluated based on accuracy measures such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR. However, a recent study argued that accuracy measures are inadequate for evaluating the degree of personalization of these models and proposed EGISES, the first metric to evaluate personalized text summaries. It was suggested that accuracy is a separate aspect and should be evaluated standalone. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of an accuracy leaderboard, suggesting that relying on accuracy-based aggregated results might lead to misleading conclusions. To support this, we delve deeper into EGISES, demonstrating both theoretically and empirically that it measures the degree of responsiveness, a necessary but not sufficient condition for degree-of-personalization. We subsequently propose PerSEval, a novel measure that satisfies the required sufficiency condition. Based on the benchmarking of ten SOTA summarization models on the PENS dataset, we empirically establish that -- (i) PerSEval is reliable w.r.t human-judgment correlation (Pearson's r = 0.73; Spearman's rho = 0.62; Kendall's tau = 0.42), (ii) PerSEval has high rank-stability, (iii) PerSEval as a rank-measure is not entailed by EGISES-based ranking, and (iv) PerSEval can be a standalone rank-measure without the need of any aggregated ranking.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 29, 2024

A Scalable Framework for Evaluating Health Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing complex datasets. Recent studies demonstrate their potential to generate useful, personalized responses when provided with patient-specific health information that encompasses lifestyle, biomarkers, and context. As LLM-driven health applications are increasingly adopted, rigorous and efficient one-sided evaluation methodologies are crucial to ensure response quality across multiple dimensions, including accuracy, personalization and safety. Current evaluation practices for open-ended text responses heavily rely on human experts. This approach introduces human factors and is often cost-prohibitive, labor-intensive, and hinders scalability, especially in complex domains like healthcare where response assessment necessitates domain expertise and considers multifaceted patient data. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics: an evaluation framework that streamlines human and automated evaluation of open-ended questions by identifying gaps in model responses using a minimal set of targeted rubrics questions. Our approach is based on recent work in more general evaluation settings that contrasts a smaller set of complex evaluation targets with a larger set of more precise, granular targets answerable with simple boolean responses. We validate this approach in metabolic health, a domain encompassing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Our results demonstrate that Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics yield higher inter-rater agreement among expert and non-expert human evaluators, and in automated assessments, compared to traditional Likert scales, while requiring approximately half the evaluation time of Likert-based methods. This enhanced efficiency, particularly in automated evaluation and non-expert contributions, paves the way for more extensive and cost-effective evaluation of LLMs in health.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 30, 2025