Poster
in
Workshop: Quantify Uncertainty and Hallucination in Foundation Models: The Next Frontier in Reliable AI
Training-Free Bayesianization for Low-Rank Adapters of Large Language Models
Haizhou Shi · Yibin Wang · Ligong Han · Huan Zhang · Hao Wang
Keywords: [ Bayesian Inference ] [ Large Language Models ] [ Uncertainty Estimation ]
Estimating the uncertainty of responses of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge. While recent Bayesian methods have demonstrated effectiveness in quantifying uncertainty through low-rank weight updates, they typically require complex fine-tuning or post-training procedures. In this paper, we propose Training-Free Bayesianization (TFB), a novel framework that efficiently transforms existing off-the-shelf trained low-rank adapters into Bayesian ones without additional training. TFB systematically searches for the maximally acceptable level of variance in the weight posterior, constrained within a family of low-rank isotropic Gaussian distributions. We theoretically demonstrate that under mild conditions, this search process is equivalent to KL-regularized variational optimization, a generalized form of variational inference. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that TFB achieves superior uncertainty estimation and generalization compared to existing methods while eliminating the need for complex training procedures.