RAP: A Metric for Balancing Repetition and Performance in Open-Source Large Language Models

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, but content repetition in open-source LLMs remains a critical challenge that adversely affects user experience. The repetition penalty parameter (RPP) aims to mitigate this issue by preventing repeated content generation, but excessive use of RPP can compromise the overall quality. In this paper, we propose Repetition-Aware Performance (RAP), a novel evaluation metric that quantifies and integrates repetition penalty into the assessment of model performance, enabling tuning of RPP. We evaluate our approach using twelve open-source LLMs, ranging from 2 billion to 70 billion parameters, tested on question answering and machine translation tasks across three datasets with varying prompting techniques. Experimental results show that RAP effectively tunes RPP, helping to identify a trade-off value that significantly reduces repetition while minimizing performance loss. Upon acceptance, we will release the code and the dataset of generated text, providing a valuable resource for further research on repetition detection and LLMs evaluation.