The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further improves the capabilities of open-domain dialogue systems and can generate fluent, coherent, and diverse responses. However, LLMs still lack an important ability: communication skills, which makes them more like information seeking tools than anthropomorphic chatbots. To make LLMs more anthropomorphic and proactive during the conversation, we add five communication skills to the response generation process: topic transition, proactively asking questions, concept guidance, empathy, and summarising often. The addition of communication skills increases the interest of users in the conversation and attracts them to chat for longer. To enable LLMs better understand and use communication skills, we design and add the inner monologue to LLMs. The complete process is achieved through prompt engineering and in-context learning. To evaluate communication skills, we construct a benchmark named Cskills for evaluating various communication skills, which can also more comprehensively evaluate the dialogue generation ability of the model. Experimental results show that the proposed CSIM strategy improves the backbone models and outperforms the baselines in both automatic and human evaluations.
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated their incredible capability in image understanding and response generation. However, this rich visual interaction also makes LVLMs vulnerable to adversarial examples. In this paper, we formulate a novel and practical gray-box attack scenario that the adversary can only access the visual encoder of the victim LVLM, without the knowledge of its prompts (which are often proprietary for service providers and not publicly available) and its underlying large language model (LLM). This practical setting poses challenges to the cross-prompt and cross-model transferability of targeted adversarial attack, which aims to confuse the LVLM to output a response that is semantically similar to the attacker's chosen target text. To this end, we propose an instruction-tuned targeted attack (dubbed InstructTA) to deliver the targeted adversarial attack on LVLMs with high transferability. Initially, we utilize a public text-to-image generative model to "reverse" the target response into a target image, and employ GPT-4 to infer a reasonable instruction $\boldsymbol{p}^\prime$ from the target response. We then form a local surrogate model (sharing the same visual encoder with the victim LVLM) to extract instruction-aware features of an adversarial image example and the target image, and minimize the distance between these two features to optimize the adversarial example. To further improve the transferability, we augment the instruction $\boldsymbol{p}^\prime$ with instructions paraphrased from an LLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in targeted attack performance and transferability.
This survey provides a comprehensive exploration of applications of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) within neural network analysis. Using TDA tools such as persistent homology and Mapper, we delve into the intricate structures and behaviors of neural networks and their datasets. We discuss different strategies to obtain topological information from data and neural networks by means of TDA. Additionally, we review how topological information can be leveraged to analyze properties of neural networks, such as their generalization capacity or expressivity. We explore practical implications of deep learning, specifically focusing on areas like adversarial detection and model selection. Our survey organizes the examined works into four broad domains: 1. Characterization of neural network architectures; 2. Analysis of decision regions and boundaries; 3. Study of internal representations, activations, and parameters; 4. Exploration of training dynamics and loss functions. Within each category, we discuss several articles, offering background information to aid in understanding the various methodologies. We conclude with a synthesis of key insights gained from our study, accompanied by a discussion of challenges and potential advancements in the field.
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content, either unintentionally or because of intentional inducement. Existing alignment methods usually direct LLMs toward the favorable outcomes by utilizing human-annotated, flawless instruction-response pairs. Conversely, this study proposes a novel alignment technique based on mistake analysis, which deliberately exposes LLMs to erroneous content to learn the reasons for mistakes and how to avoid them. In this case, mistakes are repurposed into valuable data for alignment, effectively helping to avoid the production of erroneous responses. Without external models or human annotations, our method leverages a model's intrinsic ability to discern undesirable mistakes and improves the safety of its generated responses. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms existing alignment approaches in enhancing model safety while maintaining the overall utility.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly accelerated the development of a wide range of applications across various fields. There is a growing trend in the construction of specialized platforms based on LLMs, such as the newly introduced custom GPTs by OpenAI. While custom GPTs provide various functionalities like web browsing and code execution, they also introduce significant security threats. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the security and privacy issues arising from the custom GPT platform. Our systematic examination categorizes potential attack scenarios into three threat models based on the role of the malicious actor, and identifies critical data exchange channels in custom GPTs. Utilizing the STRIDE threat modeling framework, we identify 26 potential attack vectors, with 19 being partially or fully validated in real-world settings. Our findings emphasize the urgent need for robust security and privacy measures in the custom GPT ecosystem, especially in light of the forthcoming launch of the official GPT store by OpenAI.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a main technique for alleviating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). Despite the integration of RAG, LLMs may still present unsupported or contradictory claims to the retrieved contents. In order to develop effective hallucination prevention strategies under RAG, it is important to create benchmark datasets that can measure the extent of hallucination. This paper presents RAGTruth, a corpus tailored for analyzing word-level hallucinations in various domains and tasks within the standard RAG frameworks for LLM applications. RAGTruth comprises nearly 18,000 naturally generated responses from diverse LLMs using RAG. These responses have undergone meticulous manual annotations at both the individual cases and word levels, incorporating evaluations of hallucination intensity. We not only benchmark hallucination frequencies across different LLMs, but also critically assess the effectiveness of several existing hallucination detection methodologies. Furthermore, we show that using a high-quality dataset such as RAGTruth, it is possible to finetune a relatively small LLM and achieve a competitive level of performance in hallucination detection when compared to the existing prompt-based approaches using state-of-the-art large language models such as GPT-4.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
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.
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.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.