We propose MemoChat, a pipeline for refining instructions that enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively employ self-composed memos for maintaining consistent long-range open-domain conversations. We demonstrate a long-range open-domain conversation through iterative "memorization-retrieval-response" cycles. This requires us to carefully design tailored tuning instructions for each distinct stage. The instructions are reconstructed from a collection of public datasets to teach the LLMs to memorize and retrieve past dialogues with structured memos, leading to enhanced consistency when participating in future conversations. We invite experts to manually annotate a test set designed to evaluate the consistency of long-range conversations questions. Experiments on three testing scenarios involving both open-source and API-accessible chatbots at scale verify the efficacy of MemoChat, which outperforms strong baselines.
The recent progress in large language models (LLMs), especially the invention of chain-of-thought prompting, has made it possible to automatically answer questions by stepwise reasoning. However, when faced with more complicated problems that require non-linear thinking, even the strongest LLMs make mistakes. To address this, we explore whether LLMs are able to recognize errors in their own step-by-step reasoning, without resorting to external resources. To this end, we propose SelfCheck, a general-purpose zero-shot verification schema for recognizing such errors. We then use the results of these checks to improve question-answering performance by conducting weighted voting on multiple solutions to the question. We test SelfCheck on three datasets (GSM8K, MathQA, and MATH) and find that it successfully recognizes errors and, in turn, increases final answer accuracies.
Recently, there has been growing interest in extending the context length of large language models (LLMs), aiming to effectively process long inputs of one turn or conversations with more extensive histories. While proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude can largely preserve the reasoning ability in an extended context, open-source models are still progressing through the early stages of development. To bridge this gap, we propose L-Eval to institute a more standardized evaluation for long context language models (LCLMs) addressing two key aspects: dataset construction and evaluation metrics. On the one hand, we build a new evaluation suite containing 20 sub-tasks, 508 long documents, and over 2,000 human-labeled query-response pairs encompassing diverse question styles, domains, and input length (3k$\sim$200k tokens). On the other hand, we investigate the effectiveness in evalution metrics for LCLMs. Results show that popular n-gram matching metrics generally can not correlate well with human judgment, and thus we strongly advocate for length-instruction-enhanced (LIE) evaluation and employing LLM judges. We conducted a comprehensive study of 4 popular commercial LLMs and 12 open-source counterparts using the L-Eval benchmark. Our empirical findings offer useful insights into the study of LCLMs and lay the groundwork for the development of more principled evaluation of these models.
Mixture-of-experts based models, which use language experts to extract language-specific representations effectively, have been well applied in code-switching automatic speech recognition. However, there is still substantial space to improve as similar pronunciation across languages may result in ineffective multi-language modeling and inaccurate language boundary estimation. To eliminate these drawbacks, we propose a cross-layer language adapter and a boundary-aware training method, namely Boundary-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (BA-MoE). Specifically, we introduce language-specific adapters to separate language-specific representations and a unified gating layer to fuse representations within each encoder layer. Second, we compute language adaptation loss of the mean output of each language-specific adapter to improve the adapter module's language-specific representation learning. Besides, we utilize a boundary-aware predictor to learn boundary representations for dealing with language boundary confusion. Our approach achieves significant performance improvement, reducing the mixture error rate by 16.55\% compared to the baseline on the ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English code-switching challenge dataset.
Large language models (LLMs) have recently experienced tremendous popularity and are widely used from casual conversations to AI-driven programming. However, despite their considerable success, LLMs are not entirely reliable and can give detailed guidance on how to conduct harmful or illegal activities. While safety measures can reduce the risk of such outputs, adversarial jailbreak attacks can still exploit LLMs to produce harmful content. These jailbreak templates are typically manually crafted, making large-scale testing challenging. In this paper, we introduce GPTFuzz, a novel black-box jailbreak fuzzing framework inspired by the AFL fuzzing framework. Instead of manual engineering, GPTFuzz automates the generation of jailbreak templates for red-teaming LLMs. At its core, GPTFuzz starts with human-written templates as initial seeds, then mutates them to produce new templates. We detail three key components of GPTFuzz: a seed selection strategy for balancing efficiency and variability, mutate operators for creating semantically equivalent or similar sentences, and a judgment model to assess the success of a jailbreak attack. We evaluate GPTFuzz against various commercial and open-source LLMs, including ChatGPT, LLaMa-2, and Vicuna, under diverse attack scenarios. Our results indicate that GPTFuzz consistently produces jailbreak templates with a high success rate, surpassing human-crafted templates. Remarkably, GPTFuzz achieves over 90% attack success rates against ChatGPT and Llama-2 models, even with suboptimal initial seed templates. We anticipate that GPTFuzz will be instrumental for researchers and practitioners in examining LLM robustness and will encourage further exploration into enhancing LLM safety.
The recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) has been achieved through a combo of instruction tuning and human alignment. However, building manually crafted instruction datasets and performing human alignment become the bottleneck for scaling the development of LLMs. In this paper, we exploit the idea of leveraging AI models in lieu of humans as the teacher to train student LLMs. Our method is inspired by how human students refine their writing skills by following the rubrics and learning from the revisions offered by their tutors. Specifically, we employ a teacher LLM to create a curriculum for instruction tuning of the student LLM, namely Curriculum Instruction TunING (CITING). It encompasses two main steps: (1) the teacher LLM crafts the rubrics for evaluating the answers corresponding to various types of questions, and (2) the student LLM learns to follow the rubrics and perform self-correction from the revision made by the teacher. We further iteratively carry out it to embody the procedure of CITING. We compare CITING to a series of state-of-the-art baselines on four datasets. Our method demonstrates strong improvement in terms of articulate, in-depth, and comprehensive by GPT-4 evaluation. Specifically, it achieves an average winning rate of 79.4% over SFT, 73.4% over RLHF, 78.1% over RRHF, and 76.3% over RAFT, respectively.
Large language models (LLMs), known for their capability in understanding and following instructions, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Researchers have found that current commercial LLMs either fail to be "harmless" by presenting unethical answers, or fail to be "helpful" by refusing to offer meaningful answers when faced with adversarial queries. To strike a balance between being helpful and harmless, we design a moving target defense (MTD) enhanced LLM system. The system aims to deliver non-toxic answers that align with outputs from multiple model candidates, making them more robust against adversarial attacks. We design a query and output analysis model to filter out unsafe or non-responsive answers. %to achieve the two objectives of randomly selecting outputs from different LLMs. We evaluate over 8 most recent chatbot models with state-of-the-art adversarial queries. Our MTD-enhanced LLM system reduces the attack success rate from 37.5\% to 0\%. Meanwhile, it decreases the response refusal rate from 50\% to 0\%.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications. Therefore, understanding and explaining these models is crucial for elucidating their behaviors, limitations, and social impacts. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of explainability techniques and provide a structured overview of methods for explaining Transformer-based language models. We categorize techniques based on the training paradigms of LLMs: traditional fine-tuning-based paradigm and prompting-based paradigm. For each paradigm, we summarize the goals and dominant approaches for generating local explanations of individual predictions and global explanations of overall model knowledge. We also discuss metrics for evaluating generated explanations, and discuss how explanations can be leveraged to debug models and improve performance. Lastly, we examine key challenges and emerging opportunities for explanation techniques in the era of LLMs in comparison to conventional machine learning models.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.