Rate, Explain and Cite (REC): Enhanced Explanation and Attribution in Automatic Evaluation by Large Language Models

LLMs have demonstrated impressive proficiency in generating coherent and high-quality text, making them valuable across a range of text-generation tasks. However, rigorous evaluation of this generated content is crucial, as ensuring its quality remains a significant challenge due to persistent issues such as factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. This paper introduces two fine-tuned general-purpose LLM autoevaluators, REC-12B and REC-70B, specifically designed to evaluate generated text across several dimensions: faithfulness, instruction following, coherence, and completeness. These models not only provide ratings for these metrics but also offer detailed explanations and verifiable citations, thereby enhancing trust in the content. Moreover, the models support various citation modes, accommodating different requirements for latency and granularity. Extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our general-purpose LLM auto-evaluator, REC-70B, outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, excelling in content evaluation by delivering better quality explanations and citations with minimal bias. It achieves Rank \#1 as a generative model on the RewardBench leaderboard\footnote{\url{https://huggingface.co/spaces/allenai/reward-bench}} under the model name \texttt{TextEval-Llama3.1-70B}. Our REC dataset and models are released at \url{https://github.com/adelaidehsu/REC}.

A Comprehensive Survey of LLM Alignment Techniques: RLHF, RLAIF, PPO, DPO and More

With advancements in self-supervised learning, the availability of trillions tokens in a pre-training corpus, instruction fine-tuning, and the development of large Transformers with billions of parameters, large language models (LLMs) are now capable of generating factual and coherent responses to human queries. However, the mixed quality of training data can lead to the generation of undesired responses, presenting a significant challenge. Over the past two years, various methods have been proposed from different perspectives to enhance LLMs, particularly in aligning them with human expectation. Despite these efforts, there has not been a comprehensive survey paper that categorizes and details these approaches. In this work, we aim to address this gap by categorizing these papers into distinct topics and providing detailed explanations of each alignment method, thereby helping readers gain a thorough understanding of the current state of the field.