Machine ethics ensures ethical conduct in Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and agents. Examining real-life applications benefit learning practical ethics in many situations, offering valuable data to grasp the complexities of human ethics in diverse contexts. In this paper, we examine social media platforms for understanding real-life ethical scenarios and human moral judgments. We examine posts from a popular Reddit subreddit (i.e., a subcommunity) called r/AmITheAsshole, where authors and commenters share their moral judgments on who is blameworthy. We employ computational techniques to investigate the underlying reasoning influencing moral judgments. We focus on excerpts-which we term moral sparks-from original posts that commenters include to indicate what motivates their judgments. To this end, we examine how (1) events activating social commonsense and (2) linguistic signals affect moral sparks assignment and their subsequent judgments. By examining over 24 672 posts and 175988 comments, we find that event-related negative character traits (e.g., immature and rude) attract attention and stimulate blame, implying a dependent relationship between character traits and moral values. Specially, we focus on causal graph involving events (c-events) that activate social commonsense. We observe that c-events are perceived with varying levels of informativeness, influencing moral spark and judgment assignment in distinct ways. This observation is reinforced by examining linguistic features describing semantically similar c-events. Moreover, language influencing commenters' cognitive processes enhances the probability of an excerpt becoming a moral spark, while factual and concrete descriptions tend to inhibit this effect.
In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, the concept of Red-Teaming or Jailbreaking large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a crucial area of study. This approach is especially significant in terms of assessing and enhancing the safety and robustness of these models. This paper investigates the intricate consequences of such modifications through model editing, uncovering a complex relationship between enhancing model accuracy and preserving its ethical integrity. Our in-depth analysis reveals a striking paradox: while injecting accurate information is crucial for model reliability, it can paradoxically destabilize the model's foundational framework, resulting in unpredictable and potentially unsafe behaviors. Additionally, we propose a benchmark dataset NicheHazardQA to investigate this unsafe behavior both within the same and cross topical domain. This aspect of our research sheds light on how the edits, impact the model's safety metrics and guardrails. Our findings show that model editing serves as a cost-effective tool for topical red-teaming by methodically applying targeted edits and evaluating the resultant model behavior.
Researchers and practitioners have recently reframed powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents, enabling them to automate complex tasks largely via the use of specialized functions. To facilitate the development of LLM agents, we present a novel paradigm of training LLM agents without modifying the LLM weights, which is particularly useful when the LLMs are difficult or inaccessible for modifications. Inspired by how humans continuously forge tools to adapt to real-world tasks, rather than change our biological structure to fit a static set of tools, we propose to progressively forge agent's functions to better solve the downstream tasks instead of modifying the LLM weights. By treating the functions as learnable `agent parameters' and leveraging the fundamental idea of model training in artificial intelligence, we develop AgentOptimizer that employs the LLM to update agents' functions and devise an agent training algorithm with two strategies, roll-back, and early-stop, to streamline the training process. With extensive experiments, we showcase that the agent training paradigm could significantly improve the performance of representative LLM agents in various downstream tasks. We also study the behavior of the agent training regarding aspects like the learning curve and domain transferability.
This study introduces a methodology integrating Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) principles and Transparent Shaping into an AWS-hosted Online File Manager (OFM) application, enhancing security without substantial code modifications. We evaluate our approach with the Mozilla Observatory, highlighting significant security improvements and outlining a promising direction for applying Transparent Shaping and ZTA in cloud environments.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often struggle to find strategies close to Pareto optimal Nash Equilibrium, owing largely to the lack of efficient exploration. The problem is exacerbated in sparse-reward settings, caused by the larger variance exhibited in policy learning. This paper introduces MESA, a novel meta-exploration method for cooperative multi-agent learning. It learns to explore by first identifying the agents' high-rewarding joint state-action subspace from training tasks and then learning a set of diverse exploration policies to "cover" the subspace. These trained exploration policies can be integrated with any off-policy MARL algorithm for test-time tasks. We first showcase MESA's advantage in a multi-step matrix game. Furthermore, experiments show that with learned exploration policies, MESA achieves significantly better performance in sparse-reward tasks in several multi-agent particle environments and multi-agent MuJoCo environments, and exhibits the ability to generalize to more challenging tasks at test time.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) tasks but also pose ethical and societal risks due to their propensity to generate harmful content. To address this, various approaches have been developed to safeguard LLMs from producing unsafe content. However, existing methods have limitations, including the need for training specific control models and proactive intervention during text generation, that lead to quality degradation and increased computational overhead. To mitigate those limitations, we propose LLMSafeGuard, a lightweight framework to safeguard LLM text generation in real-time. LLMSafeGuard integrates an external validator into the beam search algorithm during decoding, rejecting candidates that violate safety constraints while allowing valid ones to proceed. We introduce a similarity based validation approach, simplifying constraint introduction and eliminating the need for control model training. Additionally, LLMSafeGuard employs a context-wise timing selection strategy, intervening LLMs only when necessary. We evaluate LLMSafeGuard on two tasks, detoxification and copyright safeguarding, and demonstrate its superior performance over SOTA baselines. For instance, LLMSafeGuard reduces the average toxic score of. LLM output by 29.7% compared to the best baseline meanwhile preserving similar linguistic quality as natural output in detoxification task. Similarly, in the copyright task, LLMSafeGuard decreases the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) by 56.2% compared to baselines. Moreover, our context-wise timing selection strategy reduces inference time by at least 24% meanwhile maintaining comparable effectiveness as validating each time step. LLMSafeGuard also offers tunable parameters to balance its effectiveness and efficiency.
Although Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) utilizes edge servers (ESs) to alleviate communication burdens, its model performance will be degraded by non-IID data and limited communication resources. Current works often assume that data is uniformly distributed, which however contradicts the heterogeneity of IoT. Solutions of additional model training to check the data distribution inevitably increases computational costs and the risk of privacy leakage. The challenges in solving these issues are how to reduce the impact of non-IID data without involving raw data and how to rationalize the communication resource allocation for addressing straggler problem. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel optimization method based on coaLition formation gamE and grAdient Projection, called LEAP. Specifically, we combine edge data distribution with coalition formation game innovatively to adjust the correlations between clients and ESs dynamically, which ensures optimal correlations. We further capture the client heterogeneity to achieve the rational bandwidth allocation from coalition perception and determine the optimal transmission power within specified delay constraints at client level. Experimental results on four real datasets show that LEAP is able to achieve 20.62% improvement in model accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, LEAP effectively reduce transmission energy consumption by at least about 2.24 times.
We introduce AdaMoLE, a novel method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) through an Adaptive Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) Experts. Moving beyond conventional methods that employ a static top-k strategy for activating experts, AdaMoLE dynamically adjusts the activation threshold using a dedicated threshold network, adaptively responding to the varying complexities of different tasks. By replacing a single LoRA in a layer with multiple LoRA experts and integrating a gating function with the threshold mechanism, AdaMoLE effectively selects and activates the most appropriate experts based on the input context. Our extensive evaluations across a variety of commonsense reasoning and natural language processing tasks show that AdaMoLE exceeds baseline performance. This enhancement highlights the advantages of AdaMoLE's adaptive selection of LoRA experts, improving model effectiveness without a corresponding increase in the expert count. The experimental validation not only confirms AdaMoLE as a robust approach for enhancing LLMs but also suggests valuable directions for future research in adaptive expert selection mechanisms, potentially broadening the scope for optimizing model performance across diverse language processing tasks.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), generative large language models (LLMs) stand at the forefront, revolutionizing how we interact with our data. However, the computational intensity and memory consumption of deploying these models present substantial challenges in terms of serving efficiency, particularly in scenarios demanding low latency and high throughput. This survey addresses the imperative need for efficient LLM serving methodologies from a machine learning system (MLSys) research perspective, standing at the crux of advanced AI innovations and practical system optimizations. We provide in-depth analysis, covering a spectrum of solutions, ranging from cutting-edge algorithmic modifications to groundbreaking changes in system designs. The survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state and future directions in efficient LLM serving, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in overcoming the barriers of effective LLM deployment, thereby reshaping the future of AI.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.