Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliable

Large language models (LLMs) show impressive abilities via few-shot prompting. Commercialized APIs such as OpenAI GPT-3 further increase their use in real-world language applications. However, existing research focus on models’ accuracy on standard benchmarks and largely ignore their reliability, which is crucial for avoiding catastrophic real-world harms. While reliability is a broad and vaguely defined term, this work decomposes reliability into four facets: generalizability, fairness, calibration, and factuality. We establish simple and effective prompts to demonstrate GPT-3’s reliability in these four aspects: 1) generalize out-of-domain, 2) balance demographic distribution to reduce social biases, 3) calibrate language model probabilities, and 4) update the LLM’s knowledge. We find that by employing appropriate prompts, GPT-3 outperforms smaller-scale supervised models by large margins on all these facets. We release all processed datasets, evaluation scripts, and model predictions to facilitate future analysis. 1 Our findings not only shed new insights on the reliability of prompting LLMs, but more importantly, our prompting strategies can help practitioners more reliably use large language models like GPT-3.