SimCT: A Simple Consistency Test Protocol in LLMs Development Lifecycle

TL;DR

This paper introduces SimCT, a simple consistency testing protocol for LLM development that improves quality assurance across development stages without accessing model artifacts, thereby streamlining industrial workflows.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, practical consistency test protocol for LLMs that is easy to implement and reduces communication overhead during development.

Findings

SimCT effectively detects inconsistencies in LLM development stages.

Extensive experiments validate the protocol's effectiveness.

SimCT accelerates LLM development workflows.

Abstract

In this work, we report our efforts to advance the standard operation procedure of developing Large Language Models (LLMs) or LLMs-based systems or services in industry. We introduce the concept of Large Language Model Development Lifecycle (LDLC) and then highlight the importance of consistency test in ensuring the delivery quality. The principled solution of consistency test, however, is usually overlooked by industrial practitioners and not urgent in academia, and current practical solutions are insufficiently rigours and labor-intensive. We thus propose a simple yet effective consistency test protocol, named SimCT. SimCT is mainly to proactively check the consistency across different development stages of "bare metal" LLMs or associated services without accessing the model artifacts, in an attempt to expedite the delivery by reducing the back-and-forth alignment communications among multiple teams involved in different development stages. Specifically, SimCT encompasses response-wise and model-wise tests. We implement the protocol with LightGBM and Student's t-test for two components respectively, and perform extensive experiments to substantiate the effectiveness of SimCT and the involved components.