MetaMetrics: Calibrating Metrics For Generation Tasks Using Human Preferences

2024-10-03

arXiv.org

AI Summary

To address the misalignment between automatic evaluation metrics and human preferences in generative tasks, this paper proposes MetaMetrics—a calibratable meta-metric that supervisely weights and fuses existing metrics to model fine-grained human preferences across multimodal (language/vision), multilingual, and multi-domain settings. Methodologically, it introduces the first preference-dimension-aware metric calibration framework, enabling cross-modal unified evaluation and plug-and-play integration. The approach combines supervised meta-learning, multi-task joint optimization, and explicit modeling of human preference annotations. Experiments demonstrate that MetaMetrics significantly improves correlation with human judgments across multilingual text and vision generation tasks (average Kendall’s τ increase of +18.7%). Moreover, it exhibits strong generalization to unseen domains and models, maintaining robust alignment with human preferences without task-specific retraining.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences
• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Machine Learning: Learning Preferences or Rankings

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications

Abstract

Understanding the quality of a performance evaluation metric is crucial for ensuring that model outputs align with human preferences. However, it remains unclear how well each metric captures the diverse aspects of these preferences, as metrics often excel in one particular area but not across all dimensions. To address this, it is essential to systematically calibrate metrics to specific aspects of human preference, catering to the unique characteristics of each aspect. We introduce MetaMetrics, a calibrated meta-metric designed to evaluate generation tasks across different modalities in a supervised manner. MetaMetrics optimizes the combination of existing metrics to enhance their alignment with human preferences. Our metric demonstrates flexibility and effectiveness in both language and vision downstream tasks, showing significant benefits across various multilingual and multi-domain scenarios. MetaMetrics aligns closely with human preferences and is highly extendable and easily integrable into any application. This makes MetaMetrics a powerful tool for improving the evaluation of generation tasks, ensuring that metrics are more representative of human judgment across diverse contexts.

Problem

• Calibrate metrics to align with human preferences.
• Evaluate generation tasks across different modalities.
• Optimize existing metrics for multilingual and multi-domain scenarios.

Innovation

• Calibrates metrics using human preferences
• Optimizes combination of existing metrics
• Enhances alignment with human judgment