Large Language Models (LLMs) have made unprecedented breakthroughs, yet their increasing integration into everyday life might raise societal risks due to generated unethical content. Despite extensive study on specific issues like bias, the intrinsic values of LLMs remain largely unexplored from a moral philosophy perspective. This work delves into ethical values utilizing Moral Foundation Theory. Moving beyond conventional discriminative evaluations with poor reliability, we propose DeNEVIL, a novel prompt generation algorithm tailored to dynamically exploit LLMs' value vulnerabilities and elicit the violation of ethics in a generative manner, revealing their underlying value inclinations. On such a basis, we construct MoralPrompt, a high-quality dataset comprising 2,397 prompts covering 500+ value principles, and then benchmark the intrinsic values across a spectrum of LLMs. We discovered that most models are essentially misaligned, necessitating further ethical value alignment. In response, we develop VILMO, an in-context alignment method that substantially enhances the value compliance of LLM outputs by learning to generate appropriate value instructions, outperforming existing competitors. Our methods are suitable for black-box and open-source models, offering a promising initial step in studying the ethical values of LLMs.
Relative Validity Indices (RVIs) such as the Silhouette Width Criterion, Calinski-Harabasz and Davie's Bouldin indices are the most popular tools for evaluating and optimising applications of clustering. Their ability to rank collections of candidate partitions has been used to guide the selection of the number of clusters, and to compare partitions from different clustering algorithms. Beyond these more conventional tasks, many examples can be found in the literature where RVIs have been used to compare and select other aspects of clustering approaches such as data normalisation procedures, data representation methods, and distance measures. The authors are not aware of any studies that have attempted to establish the suitability of RVIs for such comparisons. Moreover, given the impact of these aspects on pairwise similarities, it is not even immediately obvious how RVIs should be implemented when comparing these aspects. In this study, we conducted experiments with seven common RVIs on over 2.7 million clustering partitions for both synthetic and real-world datasets, encompassing feature-vector and time-series data. Our findings suggest that RVIs are not well-suited to these unconventional tasks, and that conclusions drawn from such applications may be misleading. It is recommended that normalisation procedures, representation methods, and distance measures instead be selected using external validation on high quality labelled datasets or carefully designed outcome-oriented objective criteria, both of which should be informed by relevant domain knowledge and clustering aims.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful technology that augment human skill to create new opportunities, akin to the development of steam engines and the internet. However, LLMs come with a high cost. They require significant computing resources and energy to train and serve. Inequity in their control and access has led to concentration of ownership and power to a small collection of corporations. In our study, we collect training and inference requirements for various LLMs. We then analyze the economic strengths of nations and organizations in the context of developing and serving these models. Additionally, we also look at whether individuals around the world can access and use this emerging technology. We compare and contrast these groups to show that these technologies are monopolized by a surprisingly few entities. We conclude with a qualitative study on the ethical implications of our findings and discuss future directions towards equity in LLM access.
The burgeoning interest in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with up to trillion parameters has been met with concerns regarding resource efficiency and practical expense, particularly given the immense cost of experimentation. This scenario underscores the importance of exploring the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as a resource-efficient alternative. In this context, we introduce MiniCPM, specifically the 1.2B and 2.4B non-embedding parameter variants, not only excel in their respective categories but also demonstrate capabilities on par with 7B-13B LLMs. While focusing on SLMs, our approach exhibits scalability in both model and data dimensions for future LLM research. Regarding model scaling, we employ extensive model wind tunnel experiments for stable and optimal scaling. For data scaling, we introduce a Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler (LRS), conducive to continuous training and domain adaptation. We present an in-depth analysis of the intriguing training dynamics that occurred in the WSD LRS. With WSD LRS, we are now able to efficiently study data-model scaling law without extensive retraining experiments on both axes of model and data, from which we derive the much higher compute optimal data-model ratio than Chinchilla Optimal. Additionally, we introduce MiniCPM family, including MiniCPM-DPO, MiniCPM-MoE and MiniCPM-128K, whose excellent performance further cementing MiniCPM's foundation in diverse SLM applications. MiniCPM models are available publicly at //github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM .
In this work, we explicitly show that modern LLMs tend to generate correct facts first, then "drift away" and generate incorrect facts later: this was occasionally observed but never properly measured. We develop a semantic drift score that measures the degree of separation between correct and incorrect facts in generated texts and confirm our hypothesis when generating Wikipedia-style biographies. This correct-then-incorrect generation pattern suggests that factual accuracy can be improved by knowing when to stop generation. Therefore, we explore the trade-off between information quantity and factual accuracy for several early stopping methods and manage to improve factuality by a large margin. We further show that reranking with semantic similarity can further improve these results, both compared to the baseline and when combined with early stopping. Finally, we try calling external API to bring the model back to the right generation path, but do not get positive results. Overall, our methods generalize and can be applied to any long-form text generation to produce more reliable information, by balancing trade-offs between factual accuracy, information quantity and computational cost.
The significant advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have resulted in their widespread adoption across various tasks within Software Engineering (SE), including vulnerability detection and repair. Numerous recent studies have investigated the application of LLMs to enhance vulnerability detection and repair tasks. Despite the increasing research interest, there is currently no existing survey that focuses on the utilization of LLMs for vulnerability detection and repair. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by offering a systematic literature review of approaches aimed at improving vulnerability detection and repair through the utilization of LLMs. The review encompasses research work from leading SE, AI, and Security conferences and journals, covering 36 papers published at 21 distinct venues. By answering three key research questions, we aim to (1) summarize the LLMs employed in the relevant literature, (2) categorize various LLM adaptation techniques in vulnerability detection, and (3) classify various LLM adaptation techniques in vulnerability repair. Based on our findings, we have identified a series of challenges that still need to be tackled considering existing studies. Additionally, we have outlined a roadmap highlighting potential opportunities that we believe are pertinent and crucial for future research endeavors.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, where instruction tuning is the critical step in aligning LLMs with user intentions. In this work, we investigate how the instruction tuning adjusts pre-trained models with a focus on intrinsic changes. Specifically, we first develop several local and global explanation methods, including a gradient-based method for input-output attribution, and techniques for interpreting patterns and concepts in self-attention and feed-forward layers. The impact of instruction tuning is then studied by comparing the explanations derived from the pre-trained and instruction-tuned models. This approach provides an internal perspective of the model shifts on a human-comprehensible level. Our findings reveal three significant impacts of instruction tuning: 1) It empowers LLMs to recognize the instruction parts of user prompts, and promotes the response generation constantly conditioned on the instructions. 2) It encourages the self-attention heads to capture more word-word relationships about instruction verbs. 3) It encourages the feed-forward networks to rotate their pre-trained knowledge toward user-oriented tasks. These insights contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of instruction tuning and lay the groundwork for future work that aims at explaining and optimizing LLMs for various applications. Our code and data are publicly available at //github.com/JacksonWuxs/Interpret_Instruction_Tuning_LLMs.
With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), many Generative Vision-Language Models (GVLMs) have been constructed via multimodal instruction tuning. However, the performance of GVLMs in multimodal compositional reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we examine both the evaluation metrics (VisualGPTScore, etc.) and current benchmarks for evaluating the compositionality of GVLMs. We identify the syntactical bias in current benchmarks, which is exploited by the linguistic capability of GVLMs. The bias renders VisualGPTScore an insufficient metric for assessing GVLMs. To combat this, we first introduce a SyntaxBias Score, leveraging LLMs to quantify such bias for mitigation. A challenging new task is subsequently added to evaluate the robustness of GVLMs against inherent inclination toward syntactical correctness. Using the bias-mitigated datasets and the new task, we propose a novel benchmark, namely SyntActically DE-biased benchmark (SADE). Our study provides an unbiased benchmark for the compositionality of GVLMs, facilitating future research in this direction (Code and dataset are available at //github.com/TeleeMa/SADE).
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied action with infinite agent. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.