Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, particularly in the face of stealthy and complex jailbreaks, presents a formidable challenge. In this study, we present a simple yet highly effective defense strategy, i.e., Intention Analysis Prompting (IAPrompt). The principle behind is to trigger LLMs' inherent self-correct and improve ability through a two-stage process: 1) essential intention analysis, and 2) policy-aligned response. Notably, IAPrompt is an inference-only method, thus could enhance the safety of LLMs without compromising their helpfulness. Extensive experiments on SAP200 and DAN benchmarks across Vicuna, ChatGLM, MPT, DeepSeek, and GPT-3.5 show that IAPrompt could consistently and significantly reduce the harmfulness in response (averagely -46.5% attack success rate) and maintain the general helpfulness. Further analyses present some insights into how our method works. To facilitate reproducibility, We release our code and scripts at: //github.com/alphadl/SafeLLM_with_IntentionAnalysis
Impressive results have been achieved in natural language processing (NLP) tasks through the training of large language models (LLMs). However, these models occasionally produce toxic content such as insults, threats, and profanity in response to certain prompts, thereby constraining their practical utility. To tackle this issue, various finetuning-based and decoding-based approaches have been utilized to mitigate toxicity. However, these methods typically necessitate additional costs such as high-quality training data or auxiliary models. In this paper, we propose fine-grained detoxification via instance-level prefixes (FGDILP) to mitigate toxic text without additional cost. Specifically, FGDILP contrasts the contextualized representation in attention space using a positive prefix-prepended prompt against multiple negative prefix-prepended prompts at the instance level. This allows for constructing fine-grained subtoxicity vectors, which enables collaborative detoxification by fusing them to correct the normal generation process when provided with a raw prompt. We validate that FGDILP enables controlled text generation with regard to toxicity at both the utterance and context levels. Our method surpasses prompt-based baselines in detoxification, although at a slight cost to generation fluency and diversity.
Previous work has showcased the intriguing capability of large language models (LLMs) in retrieving facts and processing context knowledge. However, only limited research exists on the layer-wise capability of LLMs to encode knowledge, which challenges our understanding of their internal mechanisms. In this paper, we devote the first attempt to investigate the layer-wise capability of LLMs through probing tasks. We leverage the powerful generative capability of ChatGPT to construct probing datasets, providing diverse and coherent evidence corresponding to various facts. We employ $\mathcal V$-usable information as the validation metric to better reflect the capability in encoding context knowledge across different layers. Our experiments on conflicting and newly acquired knowledge show that LLMs: (1) prefer to encode more context knowledge in the upper layers; (2) primarily encode context knowledge within knowledge-related entity tokens at lower layers while progressively expanding more knowledge within other tokens at upper layers; and (3) gradually forget the earlier context knowledge retained within the intermediate layers when provided with irrelevant evidence. Code is publicly available at //github.com/Jometeorie/probing_llama.
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms represent a suite of robust computational methodologies utilized for state estimation and parameter inference within dynamical systems, particularly in real-time or online environments where data arrives sequentially over time. In this research endeavor, we propose an integrated framework that combines a stochastic epidemic simulator with a sequential importance sampling (SIS) scheme to dynamically infer model parameters, which evolve due to social as well as biological processes throughout the progression of an epidemic outbreak and are also influenced by evolving data measurement bias. Through iterative updates of a set of weighted simulated trajectories based on observed data, this framework enables the estimation of posterior distributions for these parameters, thereby capturing their temporal variability and associated uncertainties. Through simulation studies, we showcase the efficacy of SMC in accurately tracking the evolving dynamics of epidemics while appropriately accounting for uncertainties. Moreover, we delve into practical considerations and challenges inherent in implementing SMC for parameter estimation within dynamic epidemiological settings, areas where the substantial computational capabilities of high-performance computing resources can be usefully brought to bear.
Recent approaches to improving the extraction of text embeddings from autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have largely focused on improvements to data, backbone pretrained language models, or improving task-differentiation via instructions. In this work, we address an architectural limitation of autoregressive models: token embeddings cannot contain information from tokens that appear later in the input. To address this limitation, we propose a simple approach, "echo embeddings," in which we repeat the input twice in context and extract embeddings from the second occurrence. We show that echo embeddings of early tokens can encode information about later tokens, allowing us to maximally leverage high-quality LLMs for embeddings. On the MTEB leaderboard, echo embeddings improve over classical embeddings by over 9% zero-shot and by around 0.7% when fine-tuned. Echo embeddings with a Mistral-7B model achieve state-of-the-art compared to prior open source models that do not leverage synthetic fine-tuning data.
Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, their ability to generate counterfactuals has not been examined systematically. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework on various types of NLU tasks, which covers all key factors in determining LLMs' capability of generating counterfactuals. Based on this framework, we 1) investigate the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs as the counterfactual generator, and 2) disclose the factors that affect LLMs when generating counterfactuals, including both the intrinsic properties of LLMs and prompt designing. The results show that, though LLMs are promising in most cases, they face challenges in complex tasks like RE since they are bounded by task-specific performance, entity constraints, and inherent selection bias. We also find that alignment techniques, e.g., instruction-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, may potentially enhance the counterfactual generation ability of LLMs. On the contrary, simply increasing the parameter size does not yield the desired improvements. Besides, from the perspective of prompt designing, task guidelines unsurprisingly play an important role. However, the chain-of-thought approach does not always help due to inconsistency issues.
Contemporary language models enable new opportunities for structured reasoning with text, such as the construction and evaluation of intuitive, proof-like textual entailment trees without relying on brittle formal logic. However, progress in this direction has been hampered by a long-standing lack of a clear protocol for determining what valid compositional entailment is. This absence causes noisy datasets and limited performance gains by modern neuro-symbolic engines. To address these problems, we formulate a consistent and theoretically grounded approach to annotating decompositional entailment datasets, and evaluate its impact on LLM-based textual inference. We find that our resulting dataset, RDTE (Recognizing Decompositional Textual Entailment), has a substantially higher internal consistency (+9%) than prior decompositional entailment datasets, suggesting that RDTE is a significant step forward in the long-standing problem of forming a clear protocol for discerning entailment. We also find that training an RDTE-oriented entailment classifier via knowledge distillation and employing it in a modern neuro-symbolic reasoning engine significantly improves results (both accuracy and proof quality) over other entailment classifier baselines, illustrating the practical benefit of this advance for textual inference.
This report introduces \texttt{EEVE-Korean-v1.0}, a Korean adaptation of large language models that exhibit remarkable capabilities across English and Korean text understanding. Building on recent highly capable but English-centric LLMs, such as SOLAR-10.7B and Phi-2, where non-English texts are inefficiently processed with English-centric tokenizers, we present an efficient and effective vocabulary expansion (EEVE) method, which encompasses parameter freezing and subword initialization. In contrast to previous efforts that believe new embeddings require trillions of training tokens, we show that our method can significantly boost non-English proficiency within just 2 billion tokens. Surpassing most instruction-tuned LLMs on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard, as of January 2024, our model \texttt{EEVE-Korean-10.8B-v1.0} ranks as the leading Korean pre-trained model in the open-source community, according to Hugging Face's leaderboard. We open-source our models on Huggingface to empower the open research community in various languages.
This paper presents the results of finetuning large language models (LLMs) for the task of detecting vulnerabilities in source code. We leverage WizardCoder, a recent improvement of the state-of-the-art LLM StarCoder, and adapt it for vulnerability detection through further finetuning. To accelerate training, we modify WizardCoder's training procedure, also we investigate optimal training regimes. For the imbalanced dataset with many more negative examples than positive, we also explore different techniques to improve classification performance. The finetuned WizardCoder model achieves improvement in ROC AUC and F1 measures on balanced and imbalanced vulnerability datasets over CodeBERT-like model, demonstrating the effectiveness of adapting pretrained LLMs for vulnerability detection in source code. The key contributions are finetuning the state-of-the-art code LLM, WizardCoder, increasing its training speed without the performance harm, optimizing the training procedure and regimes, handling class imbalance, and improving performance on difficult vulnerability detection datasets. This demonstrates the potential for transfer learning by finetuning large pretrained language models for specialized source code analysis tasks.
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been successful in relational extraction (RE) tasks, especially in the few-shot learning. An important problem in the field of RE is long-tailed data, while not much attention is currently paid to this problem using LLM approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we propose SLCoLM, a model collaboration framework, to mitigate the data long-tail problem. In our framework, We use the ``\textit{Training-Guide-Predict}'' strategy to combine the strengths of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and LLMs, where a task-specific PLM framework acts as a tutor, transfers task knowledge to the LLM, and guides the LLM in performing RE tasks. Our experiments on a RE dataset rich in relation types show that the approach in this paper facilitates RE of long-tail relation types.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.