Inspecting the information encoded in hidden representations of large language models (LLMs) can explain models' behavior and verify their alignment with human values. Given the capabilities of LLMs in generating human-understandable text, we propose leveraging the model itself to explain its internal representations in natural language. We introduce a framework called Patchscopes and show how it can be used to answer a wide range of questions about an LLM's computation. We show that prior interpretability methods based on projecting representations into the vocabulary space and intervening on the LLM computation can be viewed as instances of this framework. Moreover, several of their shortcomings such as failure in inspecting early layers or lack of expressivity can be mitigated by Patchscopes. Beyond unifying prior inspection techniques, Patchscopes also opens up new possibilities such as using a more capable model to explain the representations of a smaller model, and unlocks new applications such as self-correction in multi-hop reasoning.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revealed their potential for achieving autonomous agents possessing human-level intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLM Agents either use static datasets, potentially leading to data leakage or focus only on single-agent scenarios, overlooking the complexities of multi-agent interactions. There is a lack of a benchmark that evaluates the diverse capabilities of LLM agents in multi-agent, dynamic environments. To this end, we introduce LLMArena, a novel and easily extensible framework for evaluating the diverse capabilities of LLM in multi-agent dynamic environments. LLMArena encompasses seven distinct gaming environments, employing Trueskill scoring to assess crucial abilities in LLM agents, including spatial reasoning, strategic planning, numerical reasoning, risk assessment, communication, opponent modeling, and team collaboration. We conduct an extensive experiment and human evaluation among different sizes and types of LLMs, showing that LLMs still have a significant journey ahead in their development towards becoming fully autonomous agents, especially in opponent modeling and team collaboration. We hope LLMArena could guide future research towards enhancing these capabilities in LLMs, ultimately leading to more sophisticated and practical applications in dynamic, multi-agent settings. The code and data will be available.
Recent statements about the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are usually supported by evaluating on open-access benchmarks. Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs' training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data, leading to LLMs being more susceptible to data contamination. However, due to the opacity of training data, the black-box access of models, and the rapid growth of synthetic training data, detecting and mitigating data contamination for LLMs faces significant challenges. In this paper, we propose CDD, which stands for Contamination Detection via output Distribution for LLMs. CDD necessitates only the sampled texts to detect data contamination, by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution. To mitigate the impact of data contamination in evaluation, we also present TED: Trustworthy Evaluation via output Distribution, based on the correction of LLM's output distribution. To facilitate this study, we introduce two benchmarks, i.e., DetCon and ComiEval, for data contamination detection and contamination mitigation evaluation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that CDD achieves the average relative improvements of 21.8\%-30.2\% over other contamination detection approaches in terms of Accuracy, F1 Score, and AUC metrics, and can effectively detect contamination caused by the variants of test data. TED significantly mitigates performance improvements up to 66.9\% attributed to data contamination across 24 settings and 21 contamination degrees. In real-world applications, we reveal that ChatGPT exhibits a high potential to suffer from data contamination on HumanEval benchmark.
The growing integration of large language models (LLMs) into social operations amplifies their impact on decisions in crucial areas such as economics, law, education, and healthcare, raising public concerns about these models' discrimination-related safety and reliability. However, prior discrimination measuring frameworks solely assess the average discriminatory behavior of LLMs, often proving inadequate due to the overlook of an additional discrimination-leading factor, i.e., the LLMs' prediction variation across diverse contexts. In this work, we present the Prejudice-Caprice Framework (PCF) that comprehensively measures discrimination in LLMs by considering both their consistently biased preference and preference variation across diverse contexts. Specifically, we mathematically dissect the aggregated contextualized discrimination risk of LLMs into prejudice risk, originating from LLMs' persistent prejudice, and caprice risk, stemming from their generation inconsistency. In addition, we utilize a data-mining approach to gather preference-detecting probes from sentence skeletons, devoid of attribute indications, to approximate LLMs' applied contexts. While initially intended for assessing discrimination in LLMs, our proposed PCF facilitates the comprehensive and flexible measurement of any inductive biases, including knowledge alongside prejudice, across various modality models. We apply our discrimination-measuring framework to 12 common LLMs, yielding intriguing findings: i) modern LLMs demonstrate significant pro-male stereotypes, ii) LLMs' exhibited discrimination correlates with several social and economic factors, iii) prejudice risk dominates the overall discrimination risk and follows a normal distribution, and iv) caprice risk contributes minimally to the overall risk but follows a fat-tailed distribution, suggesting that it is wild risk requiring enhanced surveillance.
Driven by the surge in code generation using large language models (LLMs), numerous benchmarks have emerged to evaluate these LLMs capabilities. We conducted a large-scale human evaluation of HumanEval and MBPP, two popular benchmarks for Python code generation, analyzing their diversity and difficulty. Our findings unveil a critical bias towards a limited set of programming concepts, neglecting most of the other concepts entirely. Furthermore, we uncover a worrying prevalence of easy tasks, potentially inflating model performance estimations. To address these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark, PythonSaga, featuring 185 hand-crafted prompts on a balanced representation of 38 programming concepts across diverse difficulty levels.
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in reasoning capabilities, with ongoing efforts to refine their reasoning through self-correction. However, recent studies suggest that self-correction can be limited or even counterproductive without external accurate knowledge, raising questions about the limits and effectiveness of self-correction. In this paper, we aim to enhance LLM's self-checking capabilities by meticulously designing training data, thereby improving the accuracy of self-correction. We conduct a detailed analysis of error types in mathematical reasoning and develop a tailored prompt, termed "Step CoT Check". Then we construct a checking-correction dataset for training models. After integrating the original CoT data and checking-correction data for training, we observe that models could improve their self-checking capabilities, thereby enhancing their self-correction capacity and eliminating the need for external feedback or ground truth labels to ascertain the endpoint of correction. We compare the performance of models fine-tuned with the "Step CoT Check" prompt against those refined using other promps within the context of checking-correction data. The "Step CoT Check" outperforms the other two check formats in model with lager parameters, providing more precise feedback thus achieving a higher rate of correctness. For reproducibility, all the datasets and codes are provided in //github.com/bammt/Learn-to-check.
As large language models (LLMs) see greater use in academic and commercial settings, there is increasing interest in methods that allow language models to generate texts aligned with human preferences. In this paper, we present an initial exploration of language model optimization for human preferences from direct outcome datasets, where each sample consists of a text and an associated numerical outcome measuring the reader's response. We first propose that language model optimization should be viewed as a causal problem to ensure that the model correctly learns the relationship between the text and the outcome. We formalize this causal language optimization problem, and we develop a method--causal preference optimization (CPO)--that solves an unbiased surrogate objective for the problem. We further extend CPO with doubly robust CPO (DR-CPO), which reduces the variance of the surrogate objective while retaining provably strong guarantees on bias. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of (DR-)CPO in optimizing state-of-the-art LLMs for human preferences on direct outcome data, and we validate the robustness of DR-CPO under difficult confounding conditions.
Modern language modeling tasks are often underspecified: for a given token prediction, many words may satisfy the user's intent of producing natural language at inference time, however only one word will minimize the task's loss function at training time. We introduce a simple causal mechanism to describe the role underspecification plays in the generation of spurious correlations. Despite its simplicity, our causal model directly informs the development of two lightweight black-box evaluation methods, that we apply to gendered pronoun resolution tasks on a wide range of LLMs to 1) aid in the detection of inference-time task underspecification by exploiting 2) previously unreported gender vs. time and gender vs. location spurious correlations on LLMs with a range of A) sizes: from BERT-base to GPT-4 Turbo Preview, B) pre-training objectives: from masked & autoregressive language modeling to a mixture of these objectives, and C) training stages: from pre-training only to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Code and open-source demos available at //github.com/2dot71mily/uspec.
Large language models (LLMs) may generate text that lacks consistency with human knowledge, leading to factual inaccuracies or \textit{hallucination}. Existing research for evaluating the factuality of LLMs involves extracting fact claims using an LLM and verifying them against a predefined fact source. However, these evaluation metrics are task-specific, and not scalable, and the substitutability of fact sources in different tasks is under-explored. To address these challenges, we categorize four available fact sources: human-written evidence, reference documents, search engine results, and LLM knowledge, along with five text generation tasks containing six representative datasets. Then, we propose \texttt{UFO}, an LLM-based unified and flexible evaluation framework to verify facts against plug-and-play fact sources. We implement five evaluation scenarios based on this framework. Experimental results show that for most QA tasks, human-written evidence and reference documents are crucial, and they can substitute for each other in retrieval-augmented QA tasks. In news fact generation tasks, search engine results and LLM knowledge are essential. Our dataset and code are available at \url{//github.com/WaldenRUC/UFO}.
The applications of large language models (LLMs) have expanded well beyond the confines of text processing, signaling a new era where LLMs are envisioned as generalist language agents capable of operating within complex real-world environments. These environments are often highly expansive, making it impossible for the LLM to process them within its short-term memory. Motivated by recent research on extending the capabilities of LLMs with tools, this paper investigates the intriguing potential of tools to augment LLMs in handling such complexity. To this end, we design customized tools to aid in the proactive exploration within these massive environments. Such tools can serve as a middleware layer shielding the LLM from environmental complexity. In two representative complex environments -- knowledge bases (KBs) and databases -- we demonstrate the significant potential of augmenting language agents with tools in complex environments. Notably, equipped with these tools, GPT-4 achieves 2.8X the performance of the best baseline in tasks requiring access to database content and 2.2X in KB tasks. Our findings illuminate the path for advancing language agents in complex real-world applications.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a ``chatbot'', and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively-increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.