While there is a widespread belief that artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- or even superhuman AI -- is imminent, complex problems in expert domains are far from being solved. We argue that such problems require human-AI cooperation and that the current state of the art in generative AI is unable to play the role of a reliable partner due to a multitude of shortcomings, including inability to keep track of a complex solution artifact (e.g., a software program), limited support for versatile human preference expression and lack of adapting to human preference in an interactive setting. To address these challenges, we propose HAI-Co2, a novel human-AI co-construction framework. We formalize HAI-Co2 and discuss the difficult open research problems that it faces. Finally, we present a case study of HAI-Co2 and demonstrate its efficacy compared to monolithic generative AI models.
Inverse propensity-score weighted (IPW) estimators are prevalent in causal inference for estimating average treatment effects in observational studies. Under unconfoundedness, given accurate propensity scores and $n$ samples, the size of confidence intervals of IPW estimators scales down with $n$, and, several of their variants improve the rate of scaling. However, neither IPW estimators nor their variants are robust to inaccuracies: even if a single covariate has an $\varepsilon>0$ additive error in the propensity score, the size of confidence intervals of these estimators can increase arbitrarily. Moreover, even without errors, the rate with which the confidence intervals of these estimators go to zero with $n$ can be arbitrarily slow in the presence of extreme propensity scores (those close to 0 or 1). We introduce a family of Coarse IPW (CIPW) estimators that captures existing IPW estimators and their variants. Each CIPW estimator is an IPW estimator on a coarsened covariate space, where certain covariates are merged. Under mild assumptions, e.g., Lipschitzness in expected outcomes and sparsity of extreme propensity scores, we give an efficient algorithm to find a robust estimator: given $\varepsilon$-inaccurate propensity scores and $n$ samples, its confidence interval size scales with $\varepsilon+1/\sqrt{n}$. In contrast, under the same assumptions, existing estimators' confidence interval sizes are $\Omega(1)$ irrespective of $\varepsilon$ and $n$. Crucially, our estimator is data-dependent and we show that no data-independent CIPW estimator can be robust to inaccuracies.
Despite being widely applied due to their exceptional capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. These attacks introduce targeted vulnerabilities into LLMs by poisoning training samples and full-parameter fine-tuning. However, this kind of backdoor attack is limited since they require significant computational resources, especially as the size of LLMs increases. Besides, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) offers an alternative but the restricted parameter updating may impede the alignment of triggers with target labels. In this study, we first verify that backdoor attacks with PEFT may encounter challenges in achieving feasible performance. To address these issues and improve the effectiveness of backdoor attacks with PEFT, we propose a novel backdoor attack algorithm from weak to strong based on feature alignment-enhanced knowledge distillation (W2SAttack). Specifically, we poison small-scale language models through full-parameter fine-tuning to serve as the teacher model. The teacher model then covertly transfers the backdoor to the large-scale student model through feature alignment-enhanced knowledge distillation, which employs PEFT. Theoretical analysis reveals that W2SAttack has the potential to augment the effectiveness of backdoor attacks. We demonstrate the superior performance of W2SAttack on classification tasks across four language models, four backdoor attack algorithms, and two different architectures of teacher models. Experimental results indicate success rates close to 100% for backdoor attacks targeting PEFT.
As a supplement to my talk at the workshop, this extended abstract motivates and summarizes my work with co-authors on problems in two separate areas: first, in the lambda-calculus with letrec, a universal model of computation, and second, on Milner's process interpretation of regular expressions, a proper subclass of the finite-state processes. The aim of my talk was to motivate a transferal of ideas for workable concepts of structure-constrained graphs: from the problem of finding compact graph representations for terms in the lambda-calculus with letrec to the problem of recognizing finite process graphs that can be expressed by regular expressions. In both cases the construction of structure-constrained graphs was expedient in order to enable to go back and forth easily between, in the first case, lambda-terms and term graphs, and in the second case, regular expressions and process graphs. The main focus here is on providing pointers to my work with co-authors, in both areas separately. A secondary focus is on explaining directions of my present projects, and describing research questions of possibly general interest that have developed out of my work in these two areas.
Modern computer processors use microarchitectural optimization mechanisms to improve performance. As a downside, such optimizations are prone to introducing side-channel vulnerabilities. Speculative loading of memory, called prefetching, is common in real-world CPUs and may cause such side-channel vulnerabilities: Prior work has shown that it can be exploited to bypass process isolation and leak secrets, such as keys used in RSA, AES, and ECDH implementations. However, to this date, no effective and efficient countermeasure has been presented that secures software on systems with affected prefetchers. In this work, we answer the question: How can a process defend against prefetch-based side channels? We first systematize prefetching-based side-channel vulnerabilities presented in academic literature so far. Next, we design and implement PreFence, a scheduling-aware defense against these side channels that allows processes to disable the prefetcher temporarily during security-critical operations. We implement our countermeasure for an x86_64 and an ARM processor; it can be adapted to any platform that allows to disable the prefetcher. We evaluate our defense and find that our solution reliably stops prefetch leakage. Our countermeasure causes negligible performance impact while no security-relevant code is executed, and its worst case performance is comparable to completely turning off the prefetcher. The expected average performance impact depends on the security-relevant code in the application and can be negligible as we demonstrate with a simple web server application. We expect our countermeasure could widely be integrated in commodity OS, and even be extended to signal generally security-relevant code to the kernel to allow coordinated application of countermeasures.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a common method for integrating external knowledge into pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance accuracy and relevancy in question answering (QA) tasks. However, prompt engineering and resource efficiency remain significant bottlenecks in developing optimal and robust RAG solutions for real-world QA applications. Recent studies have shown success in using fine tuning to address these problems; in particular, Retrieval Augmented Fine Tuning (RAFT) applied to smaller 7B models has demonstrated superior performance compared to RAG setups with much larger models such as GPT-3.5. The combination of RAFT with parameter-efficient fine tuning (PEFT) techniques, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), promises an even more efficient solution, yet remains an unexplored area. In this work, we combine RAFT with LoRA to reduce fine tuning and storage requirements and gain faster inference times while maintaining comparable RAG performance. This results in a more compute-efficient RAFT, or CRAFT, which is particularly useful for knowledge-intensive QA tasks in resource-constrained environments where internet access may be restricted and hardware resources limited.
Recent end-to-end speech language models (SLMs) have expanded upon the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating pre-trained speech models. However, these SLMs often undergo extensive speech instruction-tuning to bridge the gap between speech and text modalities. This requires significant annotation efforts and risks catastrophic forgetting of the original language capabilities. In this work, we present a simple yet effective automatic process for creating speech-text pair data that carefully injects speech paralinguistic understanding abilities into SLMs while preserving the inherent language capabilities of the text-based LLM. Our model demonstrates general capabilities for speech-related tasks without the need for speech instruction-tuning data, achieving impressive performance on Dynamic-SUPERB and AIR-Bench-Chat benchmarks. Furthermore, our model exhibits the ability to follow complex instructions derived from LLMs, such as specific output formatting and chain-of-thought reasoning. Our approach not only enhances the versatility and effectiveness of SLMs but also reduces reliance on extensive annotated datasets, paving the way for more efficient and capable speech understanding systems.
We present a distributed quasi-Newton (DQN) method, which enables a group of agents to compute an optimal solution of a separable multi-agent optimization problem locally using an approximation of the curvature of the aggregate objective function. Each agent computes a descent direction from its local estimate of the aggregate Hessian, obtained from quasi-Newton approximation schemes using the gradient of its local objective function. Moreover, we introduce a distributed quasi-Newton method for equality-constrained optimization (EC-DQN), where each agent takes Karush-Kuhn-Tucker-like update steps to compute an optimal solution. In our algorithms, each agent communicates with its one-hop neighbors over a peer-to-peer communication network to compute a common solution. We prove convergence of our algorithms to a stationary point of the optimization problem. In addition, we demonstrate the competitive empirical convergence of our algorithm in both well-conditioned and ill-conditioned optimization problems, in terms of the computation time and communication cost incurred by each agent for convergence, compared to existing distributed first-order and second-order methods. Particularly, in ill-conditioned problems, our algorithms achieve a faster computation time for convergence, while requiring a lower communication cost, across a range of communication networks with different degrees of connectedness.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.