Measuring and Modifying Factual Knowledge in Large Language Models
Pouya Pezeshkpour
Large Language Models (LLMs) store an extensive amount of factual knowledge
obtained from vast collections of text. To effectively utilize these models for
downstream tasks, it is crucial to have reliable methods for measuring their
knowledge. However, existing approaches for knowledge measurement have certain
limitations, and despite recent efforts, they fail to provide accurate
measurements and the necessary insights for modifying the knowledge within
LLMs. In this work, we employ information theory-based measurements to provide
a framework estimating the factual knowledge contained within large language
models. More specifically, we measure knowledge by analyzing the LLM's
prediction probability distribution before and after instilling the target
knowledge, employing metrics such as entropy and KL-divergence. Introducing our
metrics, we first assess their accuracy in comparison to previous ranking-based
methods, surpassing them by over $35\%$ in a synthetic experiment. Then, we
explore two prominent methods of knowledge instillation, discovering that LLMs
exhibit limitations in capturing new knowledge under specific circumstances for
one of these methods. Lastly, we demonstrate the applicability of our methods
in extracting unlearned and mislearned facts in LLMs through their application
to in-context learning. We make code and data for all methods and experiments
in this paper publicly available.