Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) provide a powerful foundation for natural language tasks in large-scale customer-facing applications. However, studies that explore their vulnerabilities emerging from malicious user interaction are scarce. By proposing PromptInject, a prosaic alignment framework for mask-based iterative adversarial prompt composition, we examine how GPT-3, the most widely deployed language model in production, can be easily misaligned by simple handcrafted inputs. In particular, we investigate two types of attacks -- goal hijacking and prompt leaking -- and demonstrate that even low-aptitude, but sufficiently ill-intentioned agents, can easily exploit GPT-3's stochastic nature, creating long-tail risks. The code for PromptInject is available at https://github.com/agencyenterprise/PromptInject.

That is, the Van Gogh Test for sheer creativity. This past Thursday night, Discovery Institute's tech summit COSM 2022 presented a live, in-person interview with Federico Faggin, the Italian physicist and computer engineer who co-won the prestigious Kyoto Prize in 1997 for helping develop the Intel 4004 chip. Faggin was interviewed by technology reporter Maria Teresa Cometto, who asked him to regale the audience with tales about helping to design early microchips. Eventually Faggin recounted a time when he was "studying neuroscience and biology, trying to understand how the brain works," and came upon a startling realization: And at one point I asked myself, "But wait a second, I mean these books, all this talk about electrical signals, biochemical signals, but when I taste some chocolate, I mean I have a taste. A computer, does it taste this? Does it have a sensation or a feeling for the signals that he has in his memory or in his CPU? So where are sensations and feelings coming from?" … And so I discovered what was later called the hard problem of consciousness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been transformative. They are pre-trained foundational models that are self-supervised and can be adapted with fine tuning to a wide range of natural language tasks, each of which previously would have required a separate network model. This is one step closer to the extraordinary versatility of human language. GPT-3 and more recently LaMDA can carry on dialogs with humans on many topics after minimal priming with a few examples. However, there has been a wide range of reactions and debate on whether these LLMs understand what they are saying or exhibit signs of intelligence. This high variance is exhibited in three interviews with LLMs reaching wildly different conclusions. A new possibility was uncovered that could explain this divergence. What appears to be intelligence in LLMs may in fact be a mirror that reflects the intelligence of the interviewer, a remarkable twist that could be considered a Reverse Turing Test. If so, then by studying interviews we may be learning more about the intelligence and beliefs of the interviewer than the intelligence of the LLMs. As LLMs become more capable they may transform the way we interact with machines and how they interact with each other. Increasingly, LLMs are being coupled with sensorimotor devices. LLMs can talk the talk, but can they walk the walk? A road map for achieving artificial general autonomy is outlined with seven major improvements inspired by brain systems. LLMs could be used to uncover new insights into brain function by downloading brain data during natural behaviors.

In this thesis, we investigated the relevance, faithfulness, and succinctness aspects of Long Form Question Answering (LFQA). LFQA aims to generate an in-depth, paragraph-length answer for a given question, to help bridge the gap between real scenarios and the existing open-domain QA models which can only extract short-span answers. LFQA is quite challenging and under-explored. Few works have been done to build an effective LFQA system. It is even more challenging to generate a good-quality long-form answer relevant to the query and faithful to facts, since a considerable amount of redundant, complementary, or contradictory information will be contained in the retrieved documents. Moreover, no prior work has been investigated to generate succinct answers. We are among the first to research the LFQA task. We pioneered the research direction to improve the answer quality in terms of 1) query-relevance, 2) answer faithfulness, and 3) answer succinctness.

Did you have the chance to attend the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022) in Kyoto? Here we bring you the papers that received an award this year in case you missed them.

In open-ended natural-language generation, existing text decoding methods typically struggle to produce text which is both diverse and high-quality. Greedy and beam search are known to suffer from text degeneration and linguistic diversity issues, while temperature, top-k, and nucleus sampling often yield diverse but low-quality outputs. In this work, we present crowd sampling, a family of decoding methods based on Bayesian risk minimization, to address this diversity-quality trade-off. Inspired by the principle of "the wisdom of the crowd," crowd sampling seeks to select a candidate from a pool of candidates that has the least expected risk (i.e., highest expected reward) under a generative model according to a given utility function. Crowd sampling can be seen as a generalization of numerous existing methods, including majority voting, and in practice, it can be used as a drop-in replacement for existing sampling methods. Extensive experiments show that crowd sampling delivers improvements of 3-7 ROUGE and BLEU points across a wide range of tasks, including summarization, data-to-text, translation, and textual style transfer, while achieving new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG and WMT'16.

Abstract--Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structured information from heterogeneous sources. IE from natural language texts include sub-tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Event Extraction (EE). Most IE systems require comprehensive understandings of sentence structure, implied semantics, and domain knowledge to perform well; thus, IE tasks always need adequate external resources and annotations. However, it takes time and effort to obtain more human annotations. Low-Resource Information Extraction (LRIE) strives to use unsupervised data, reducing the required resources and human annotation. In practice, existing systems either utilize self-training schemes to generate pseudo labels that will cause the gradual drift problem, or leverage consistency regularization methods which inevitably possess confirmation bias. To alleviate confirmation bias due to the lack of feedback loops in existing LRIE learning paradigms, we develop a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning (GIRL) method to encourage pseudo-labeled data to imitate the gradient descent direction on labeled data, which can force pseudo-labeled data to achieve better optimization capabilities similar to labeled data. Based on how well the pseudo-labeled data imitates the instructive gradient descent direction obtained from labeled data, we design a reward to quantify the imitation process and bootstrap the optimization capability of pseudo-labeled data through trial and error. In addition to learning paradigms, GIRL is not limited to specific sub-tasks, and we leverage GIRL to solve all IE sub-tasks (named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction) in low-resource settings (semi-supervised IE and few-shot IE).

The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the pre-trained distribution towards preferred outputs, in others it is to steer it towards a different distribution over the sample space. Two main paradigms have emerged to tackle this challenge: Reward Maximization (RM) and, more recently, Distribution Matching (DM). RM applies standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques, such as Policy Gradients, to gradually increase the reward signal. DM prescribes to first make explicit the target distribution that the model is fine-tuned to approximate. Here we explore the theoretical connections between the two paradigms, and show that methods such as KL-control developed for RM can also be construed as belonging to DM. We further observe that while DM differs from RM, it can suffer from similar training difficulties, such as high gradient variance. We leverage connections between the two paradigms to import the concept of baseline into DM methods. We empirically validate the benefits of adding a baseline on an array of controllable language generation tasks such as constraining topic, sentiment, and gender distributions in texts sampled from a language model. We observe superior performance in terms of constraint satisfaction, stability and sample efficiency.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is built on data. Yet, many organizations are still finding it hard to implement AI properly to make the most out of their data. There are concerns that the AI is not able to comprehend the data the way they want it to, especially with more businesses having their data stored across the multi-cloud and even on-premise. When it comes to data analytics, SAS has been a household vendor in the industry for years. The data analytics leader continues to pioneer new innovations when it comes to providing businesses with the insights they need in the best way possible.

DeviantArt, the Wix-owned artist community, today announced a new protection for creators to disallow art-generating AI systems from being developed using their artwork. An option on the site will allow artists to preclude third parties from scraping their content for AI development purposes, aiming to prevent work from being swept up without artists' knowledge or permission. "AI technology for creation is a powerful force we can't ignore. . . . It would be impossible for DeviantArt to try to block or censor this art technology," CEO Moti Levy told TechCrunch in an email interview. "We see so many instances where AI tools help artists' creativity, allowing them to express themselves in ways they could not in the past. That said, we believe we have a responsibility to all creators. To support AI art, we must also implement fair tools and add protections in this domain."