The study explores mitigating overconfidence bias in LLMs to improve their reliability. We introduce a knowledge transfer (KT) method utilizing chain of thoughts, where "big" LLMs impart knowledge to "small" LLMs via detailed, sequential reasoning paths. This method uses advanced reasoning of larger models to fine-tune smaller models, enabling them to produce more accurate predictions with calibrated confidence. Experimental evaluation using multiple-choice questions and sentiment analysis across diverse datasets demonstrated the KT method's superiority over the vanilla and question-answer pair (QA) fine-tuning methods. The most significant improvement in three key metrics, where the KT method outperformed the vanilla and QA methods by an average of 55.3% and 43.1%, respectively. These findings underscore the KT method's potential in enhancing model trustworthiness and accuracy, offering precise outputs with well-matched confidence levels across various contexts.
The Retrieval Question Answering (ReQA) task employs the retrieval-augmented framework, composed of a retriever and generator. The generator formulates the answer based on the documents retrieved by the retriever. Incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) as generators is beneficial due to their advanced QA capabilities, but they are typically too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints while some of them are only accessible via APIs. To tackle this issue and further improve ReQA performance, we propose a trainable Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (PRCA), keeping the generator as a black box. Positioned between the retriever and generator in a Pluggable manner, PRCA refines the retrieved information by operating in a token-autoregressive strategy via maximizing rewards of the reinforcement learning phase. Our experiments validate PRCA's effectiveness in enhancing ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% improvement to fit black-box LLMs into existing frameworks, demonstrating its considerable potential in the LLMs era.