Temperature 0 is never used
It is in some cases, where you want a deterministic / “best” response. Seen it used in benchmarks, or when doing some “Is this comment X?” where X is positive, negative, spam, and so on. You don’t want the model to get creative there, but rather answer consistently and always the most likely path.
You can call that confidence if you want, but it got very little to do with how “sure” the model is.
Actually, it would be "The confidence of token Th is 0.95, the confidence of S is 0.32, the confidence of … " and so on for each possible token, many llm’s have around 16k-32k token vocabulary. Most will be at or near 0. So you pick Th, and then token “e” will probably be very high next, then a space token, then… Anyway, the confidence of the word “Paris” won’t be until far into the generation.
Now there is some overseeing logic in a way, if you ask what the capitol of a non existent country is it’ll say there’s no such country, but is that because it understands it doesn’t know, or the training data has enough examples of such that it has the statistical data for writing out such an answer?
I assume by SLM you mean smaller LLM’s like for example mistral 7b and llama3.1 8b? Well those were the kind of models I did try for local RAG.
Well, it was before llama3, but I remember trying mistral, mixtral, llama2 70b, command-r, phi, vicuna, yi, and a few others. They all made mistakes.
I especially remember one case where a product manual had this text : “If the same or a newer version of <product> is already installed on the computer, then the <product> installation will be aborted, and the currently installed version will be maintained” and the question was “What happens if an older version of <product> is already installed?” and every local model answered that then that version will be kept and the installation will be aborted.
When trying with OpenAI’s latest model at that time, I think 4, it got it right. In general, about 1 in ~5-7 answers to RAG backed questions were wrong, depending on the model and type of question. I could usually reword the question to get the correct answer, but to do that you kinda already have to know the answer is wrong. Which defeats the whole point of it.