Pre-training, which utilizes extensive and varied datasets, is a critical factor in the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across numerous applications. However, the detailed makeup of these datasets is often not disclosed, leading to concerns about data security and potential misuse. This is particularly relevant when copyrighted material, still under legal protection, is used inappropriately, either intentionally or unintentionally, infringing on the rights of the authors. In this paper, we introduce a detailed framework designed to detect and assess the presence of content from potentially copyrighted books within the training datasets of LLMs. This framework also provides a confidence estimation for the likelihood of each content sample's inclusion. To validate our approach, we conduct a series of simulated experiments, the results of which affirm the framework's effectiveness in identifying and addressing instances of content misuse in LLM training processes. Furthermore, we investigate the presence of recognizable quotes from famous literary works within these datasets. The outcomes of our study have significant implications for ensuring the ethical use of copyrighted materials in the development of LLMs, highlighting the need for more transparent and responsible data management practices in this field.

Text Normalization is an integral part of any text-to-speech synthesis system. In a natural language text, there are elements such as numbers, dates, abbreviations, etc. that belong to other semiotic classes. They are called non-standard words (NSW) and need to be expanded into ordinary words. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the semiotic class of each NSW. The taxonomy of semiotic classes adapted to the Lithuanian language is presented in the work. Sets of rules are created for detecting and expanding NSWs based on regular expressions. Experiments with three completely different data sets were performed and the accuracy was assessed. Causes of errors are explained and recommendations are given for the development of text normalization rules.

Multistream classification poses significant challenges due to the necessity for rapid adaptation in dynamic streaming processes with concept drift. Despite the growing research outcomes in this area, there has been a notable oversight regarding the temporal dynamic relationships between these streams, leading to the issue of negative transfer arising from irrelevant data. In this paper, we propose a novel Online Boosting Adaptive Learning (OBAL) method that effectively addresses this limitation by adaptively learning the dynamic correlation among different streams. Specifically, OBAL operates in a dual-phase mechanism, in the first of which we design an Adaptive COvariate Shift Adaptation (AdaCOSA) algorithm to construct an initialized ensemble model using archived data from various source streams, thus mitigating the covariate shift while learning the dynamic correlations via an adaptive re-weighting strategy. During the online process, we employ a Gaussian Mixture Model-based weighting mechanism, which is seamlessly integrated with the acquired correlations via AdaCOSA to effectively handle asynchronous drift. This approach significantly improves the predictive performance and stability of the target stream. We conduct comprehensive experiments on several synthetic and real-world data streams, encompassing various drifting scenarios and types. The results clearly demonstrate that OBAL achieves remarkable advancements in addressing multistream classification problems by effectively leveraging positive knowledge derived from multiple sources.

We administer a Turing Test to AI Chatbots. We examine how Chatbots behave in a suite of classic behavioral games that are designed to elicit characteristics such as trust, fairness, risk-aversion, cooperation, \textit{etc.}, as well as how they respond to a traditional Big-5 psychological survey that measures personality traits. ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and personality traits that are statistically indistinguishable from a random human from tens of thousands of human subjects from more than 50 countries. Chatbots also modify their behavior based on previous experience and contexts ``as if'' they were learning from the interactions, and change their behavior in response to different framings of the same strategic situation. Their behaviors are often distinct from average and modal human behaviors, in which case they tend to behave on the more altruistic and cooperative end of the distribution. We estimate that they act as if they are maximizing an average of their own and partner's payoffs.

While large language models have proven effective in a huge range of downstream applications, they often generate text that is problematic or lacks a desired attribute. In this paper, we introduce Reward-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a text generation procedure that uses a small unidirectional reward model to encourage a language model to generate text that has certain properties. Specifically, RAD uses the reward model to score generations as they are produced and rescales sampling probabilities to favor high-reward tokens. By using a unidirectional reward model, RAD can cache activations from prior generation steps to decrease computational overhead. Through experiments on generating non-toxic and sentiment-controlled text, we demonstrate that RAD performs best among methods that change only the generation procedure and matches the performance of state-of-the-art methods that involve re-training the language model. We further validate that RAD is effective on very large language models while incurring a minimal computational overhead.

Differentially Private Federated Learning (DP-FL) has garnered attention as a collaborative machine learning approach that ensures formal privacy. Most DP-FL approaches ensure DP at the record-level within each silo for cross-silo FL. However, a single user's data may extend across multiple silos, and the desired user-level DP guarantee for such a setting remains unknown. In this study, we present Uldp-FL, a novel FL framework designed to guarantee user-level DP in cross-silo FL where a single user's data may belong to multiple silos. Our proposed algorithm directly ensures user-level DP through per-user weighted clipping, departing from group-privacy approaches. We provide a theoretical analysis of the algorithm's privacy and utility. Additionally, we enhance the utility of the proposed algorithm with an enhanced weighting strategy based on user record distribution and design a novel private protocol that ensures no additional information is revealed to the silos and the server. Experiments on real-world datasets show substantial improvements in our methods in privacy-utility trade-offs under user-level DP compared to baseline methods. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first FL framework that effectively provides user-level DP in the general cross-silo FL setting.

The growing popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT is having transformative effects on social media. As the prevalence of AI-generated content grows, concerns have been raised regarding privacy and misinformation online. Among social media platforms, Discord enables AI integrations -- making their primarily "Generation Z" userbase particularly exposed to AI-generated content. We surveyed Generation Z aged individuals (n = 335) to evaluate their proficiency in discriminating between AI-generated and human-authored text on Discord. The investigation employed one-shot prompting of ChatGPT, disguised as a text message received on the Discord.com platform. We explore the influence of demographic factors on ability, as well as participants' familiarity with Discord and artificial intelligence technologies. We find that Generation Z individuals are unable to discern between AI and human-authored text (p = 0.011), and that those with lower self-reported familiarity with Discord demonstrated an improved ability in identifying human-authored compared to those with self-reported experience with AI (p << 0.0001). Our results suggest that there is a nuanced relationship between AI technology and popular modes of communication for Generation Z, contributing valuable insights into human-computer interactions, digital communication, and artificial intelligence literacy.

Enterprise documents such as forms, invoices, receipts, reports, contracts, and other similar records, often carry rich semantics at the intersection of textual and spatial modalities. The visual cues offered by their complex layouts play a crucial role in comprehending these documents effectively. In this paper, we present DocLLM, a lightweight extension to traditional large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over visual documents, taking into account both textual semantics and spatial layout. Our model differs from existing multimodal LLMs by avoiding expensive image encoders and focuses exclusively on bounding box information to incorporate the spatial layout structure. Specifically, the cross-alignment between text and spatial modalities is captured by decomposing the attention mechanism in classical transformers to a set of disentangled matrices. Furthermore, we devise a pre-training objective that learns to infill text segments. This approach allows us to address irregular layouts and heterogeneous content frequently encountered in visual documents. The pre-trained model is fine-tuned using a large-scale instruction dataset, covering four core document intelligence tasks. We demonstrate that our solution outperforms SotA LLMs on 14 out of 16 datasets across all tasks, and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired answers. However, LLMs trained with SFT sometimes make simple mistakes and result in hallucinations on reasoning tasks such as question-answering. Without external feedback, it is difficult for SFT to learn a good mapping between the question and the desired answer, especially with a small dataset. This paper introduces an alternative to SFT called Natural Language Feedback for Finetuning LLMs (LaFFi). LaFFi has LLMs directly predict the feedback they will receive from an annotator. We find that requiring such reflection can significantly improve the accuracy in in-domain question-answering tasks, providing a promising direction for the application of natural language feedback in the realm of SFT LLMs. Additional ablation studies show that the portion of human-annotated data in the annotated datasets affects the fine-tuning performance.

We consider the problem of tracking multiple, unknown, and time-varying numbers of objects using a distributed network of heterogeneous sensors. In an effort to derive a formulation for practical settings, we consider limited and unknown sensor field-of-views (FoVs), sensors with limited local computational resources and communication channel capacity. The resulting distributed multi-object tracking algorithm involves solving an NP-hard multidimensional assignment problem either optimally for small-size problems or sub-optimally for general practical problems. For general problems, we propose an efficient distributed multi-object tracking algorithm that performs track-to-track fusion using a clustering-based analysis of the state space transformed into a density space to mitigate the complexity of the assignment problem. The proposed algorithm can more efficiently group local track estimates for fusion than existing approaches. To ensure we achieve globally consistent identities for tracks across a network of nodes as objects move between FoVs, we develop a graph-based algorithm to achieve label consensus and minimise track segmentation. Numerical experiments with a synthetic and a real-world trajectory dataset demonstrate that our proposed method is significantly more computationally efficient than state-of-the-art solutions, achieving similar tracking accuracy and bandwidth requirements but with improved label consistency.