Government
Towards Safer Chatbots: A Framework for Policy Compliance Evaluation of Custom GPTs
Rodriguez, David, Seymour, William, Del Alamo, Jose M., Such, Jose
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained unprecedented prominence, achieving widespread adoption across diverse domains and integrating deeply into society. The capability to fine-tune general-purpose LLMs, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), for specific tasks has facilitated the emergence of numerous Custom GPTs. These tailored models are increasingly made available through dedicated marketplaces, such as OpenAI's GPT Store. However, their black-box nature introduces significant safety and compliance risks. In this work, we present a scalable framework for the automated evaluation of Custom GPTs against OpenAI's usage policies, which define the permissible behaviors of these systems. Our framework integrates three core components: (1) automated discovery and data collection of models from the GPT store, (2) a red-teaming prompt generator tailored to specific policy categories and the characteristics of each target GPT, and (3) an LLM-as-a-judge technique to analyze each prompt-response pair for potential policy violations. We validate our framework with a manually annotated ground truth, and evaluate it through a large-scale study with 782 Custom GPTs across three categories: Romantic, Cybersecurity, and Academic GPTs. Our manual annotation process achieved an F1 score of 0.975 in identifying policy violations, confirming the reliability of the framework's assessments. The results reveal that 58.7% of the analyzed models exhibit indications of non-compliance, exposing weaknesses in the GPT store's review and approval processes. Furthermore, our findings indicate that a model's popularity does not correlate with compliance, and non-compliance issues largely stem from behaviors inherited from base models rather than user-driven customizations. We believe this approach is extendable to other chatbot platforms and policy domains, improving LLM-based systems safety.
Re-examining Double Descent and Scaling Laws under Norm-based Capacity via Deterministic Equivalence
Wang, Yichen, Chen, Yudong, Rosasco, Lorenzo, Liu, Fanghui
The number of parameters, i.e., model size, provides a basic measure of the capacity of a machine learning (ML) model. However it is well known that it might not describe the effective model capacity (Bartlett, 1998), especially for over-parameterized neural networks (Belkin et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2021) and large language models (Brown et al., 2020). The focus on the number of parameters results in an inaccurate characterization of the relationship between the test risk R, training data size n, and model size p, which is central in ML to understand the bias-variance trade-off (Vapnik, 1995), double descent (Belkin et al., 2019) and scaling laws (Kaplan et al., 2020; Xiao, 2024). For example, even for the same architecture (model size), the test error behavior can be totally different (Nakkiran et al., 2020, 2021), e.g., double descent may disappear. Here we shift the focus from model size to weights and consider their norm, a perspective pioneered in the classical results in Bartlett (1998). Indeed, norm based capacity/complexity are widely considered to be more effective in characterizing generalization behavior, see e.g.
Building a Cognitive Twin Using a Distributed Cognitive System and an Evolution Strategy
Gibaut, Wandemberg, Gudwin, Ricardo
Approximately at the same time, based on the ideas This work proposes an approach that uses an evolutionary presented by Newell, Rosenbloom and Laird (1989), Laird algorithm along traditional Machine Learning methods released early versions of the SOAR cognitive architecture to build a digital, distributed cognitive agent capable of (Laird and Rosenbloom, 1996; Laird, 2012). By the end of emulating the potential actions (input-output behavior) of the 1990s, a large group of researchers involved in the Simulation a user while allowing further analysis and experimentation of Adaptive Behavior shaped the concept of Cognitive - at a certain level - of its internal structures. We focus Architecture as an essential set of structures and processes on the usage of simple devices and the automation of this necessary for the generation of a computational, cognitive building process, rather than manually designing the agent.
Fairness through Difference Awareness: Measuring Desired Group Discrimination in LLMs
Wang, Angelina, Phan, Michelle, Ho, Daniel E., Koyejo, Sanmi
Algorithmic fairness has conventionally adopted a perspective of racial color-blindness (i.e., difference unaware treatment). We contend that in a range of important settings, group difference awareness matters. For example, differentiating between groups may be necessary in legal contexts (e.g., the U.S. compulsory draft applies to men but not women) and harm assessments (e.g., calling a girl a terrorist may be less harmful than calling a Muslim person one). In our work we first introduce an important distinction between descriptive (fact-based), normative (value-based), and correlation (association-based) benchmarks. This distinction is significant because each category requires distinct interpretation and mitigation tailored to its specific characteristics. Then, we present a benchmark suite composed of eight different scenarios for a total of 16k questions that enables us to assess difference awareness. Finally, we show results across ten models that demonstrate difference awareness is a distinct dimension of fairness where existing bias mitigation strategies may backfire.
Breaking Focus: Contextual Distraction Curse in Large Language Models
Huang, Yue, Wang, Yanbo, Xu, Zixiang, Gao, Chujie, Wu, Siyuan, Ye, Jiayi, Chen, Xiuying, Chen, Pin-Yu, Zhang, Xiangliang
Large Language Models (LLMs) (Zhou et al., 2023b) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, revolutionizing wide downstream applications such as medicine (Zhao et al., 2023), education (Kasneci et al., 2023), and science (Li et al., 2024b; Guo et al., 2023; Huang et al., 2024e). Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have exposed various vulnerabilities in LLMs, including susceptibility to jailbreaking attacks (Zou et al., 2023), hallucination issues (Xu et al., 2024b), and consistency problems (Liang et al., 2024; Huang et al., 2024a). These vulnerabilities highlight the limitations of LLMs in handling nuanced and adversarial scenarios, making it critical to uncover and analyze additional weaknesses to improve their reliability. In this work, we investigate a novel vulnerability termed Contextual Distraction Vulnerability (CDV), where semantically coherent but non-essential contextual additions to a question degrade LLM performance. For instance, a customer service chatbot might miss a refund request hidden in a short story about discovering products through social media influencers. Similarly, a technical query about machine learning could be misunderstood if it's preceded by a student's emotional account of exam preparation anxiety. Unlike adversarial attacks that inject semantically meaningless noise into inputs (Zou et al., 2023; Shi et al., 2024) and distraction brought by long-context input (Bai et al., 2023), for CDV, our study demonstrates that semantically coherent without a long context yet contextually distracting modifications are sufficient to disrupt the decision-making process of even the most advanced LLMs. This vulnerability underscores a critical weakness in LLMs' ability to filter out irrelevant information and prioritize core knowledge, which is essential for robust reasoning. Recent studies have demonstrated the powerful generative capabilities of LLM Xu et al. (2024a); Wu et al. (2024), To systematically investigate this vulnerability, we propose a methodology for
Develop AI Agents for System Engineering in Factorio
Continuing advances in frontier model research are paving the way for widespread deployment of AI agents. Meanwhile, global interest in building large, complex systems in software, manufacturing, energy and logistics has never been greater. Although AI driven system engineering holds tremendous promise, the static benchmarks dominating agent evaluations today fail to capture the crucial skills required for implementing dynamic systems, such as managing uncertain trade-offs and ensuring proactive adaptability. This position paper advocates for training and evaluating AI agents' system engineering abilities through automation-oriented sandbox games-particularly Factorio. By directing research efforts in this direction, we can equip AI agents with the specialized reasoning and long-horizon planning necessary to design, maintain, and optimize tomorrow's most demanding engineering projects.
Efficient Prior Selection in Gaussian Process Bandits with Thompson Sampling
Sandberg, Jack, Chehreghani, Morteza Haghir
Gaussian process (GP) bandits provide a powerful framework for solving blackbox optimization of unknown functions. The characteristics of the unknown function depends heavily on the assumed GP prior. Most work in the literature assume that this prior is known but in practice this seldom holds. Instead, practitioners often rely on maximum likelihood estimation to select the hyperparameters of the prior - which lacks theoretical guarantees. In this work, we propose two algorithms for joint prior selection and regret minimization in GP bandits based on GP Thompson sampling (GP-TS): Prior-Elimination GP-TS (PE-GP-TS) and HyperPrior GP-TS (HP-GP-TS). We theoretically analyze the algorithms and establish upper bounds for their respective regret. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms compared to the alternatives through experiments with synthetic and real-world data.
SatFlow: Generative model based framework for producing High Resolution Gap Free Remote Sensing Imagery
Irigireddy, Bharath, Bandaru, Varaprasad
Frequent, high-resolution remote sensing imagery is crucial for agricultural and environmental monitoring. Satellites from the Landsat collection offer detailed imagery at 30m resolution but with lower temporal frequency, whereas missions like MODIS and VIIRS provide daily coverage at coarser resolutions. Clouds and cloud shadows contaminate about 55\% of the optical remote sensing observations, posing additional challenges. To address these challenges, we present SatFlow, a generative model-based framework that fuses low-resolution MODIS imagery and Landsat observations to produce frequent, high-resolution, gap-free surface reflectance imagery. Our model, trained via Conditional Flow Matching, demonstrates better performance in generating imagery with preserved structural and spectral integrity. Cloud imputation is treated as an image inpainting task, where the model reconstructs cloud-contaminated pixels and fills gaps caused by scan lines during inference by leveraging the learned generative processes. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of our approach in reliably imputing cloud-covered regions. This capability is crucial for downstream applications such as crop phenology tracking, environmental change detection etc.,
Can We Validate Counterfactual Estimations in the Presence of General Network Interference?
Shirani, Sadegh, Luo, Yuwei, Overman, William, Xiong, Ruoxuan, Bayati, Mohsen
In experimental settings with network interference, a unit's treatment can influence outcomes of other units, challenging both causal effect estimation and its validation. Classic validation approaches fail as outcomes are only observable under one treatment scenario and exhibit complex correlation patterns due to interference. To address these challenges, we introduce a new framework enabling cross-validation for counterfactual estimation. At its core is our distribution-preserving network bootstrap method -- a theoretically-grounded approach inspired by approximate message passing. This method creates multiple subpopulations while preserving the underlying distribution of network effects. We extend recent causal message-passing developments by incorporating heterogeneous unit-level characteristics and varying local interactions, ensuring reliable finite-sample performance through non-asymptotic analysis. We also develop and publicly release a comprehensive benchmark toolbox with diverse experimental environments, from networks of interacting AI agents to opinion formation in real-world communities and ride-sharing applications. These environments provide known ground truth values while maintaining realistic complexities, enabling systematic examination of causal inference methods. Extensive evaluation across these environments demonstrates our method's robustness to diverse forms of network interference. Our work provides researchers with both a practical estimation framework and a standardized platform for testing future methodological developments.
BYON: Bring Your Own Networks for Digital Agriculture Applications
Sie, Emerson, Tao, Bill, Mihigo, Aganze, Karmehan, Parithimaal, Zhang, Max, Sivakumar, Arun N., Chowdhary, Girish, Vasisht, Deepak
Digital agriculture technologies rely on sensors, drones, robots, and autonomous farm equipment to improve farm yields and incorporate sustainability practices. However, the adoption of such technologies is severely limited by the lack of broadband connectivity in rural areas. We argue that farming applications do not require permanent always-on connectivity. Instead, farming activity and digital agriculture applications follow seasonal rhythms of agriculture. Therefore, the need for connectivity is highly localized in time and space. We introduce BYON, a new connectivity model for high bandwidth agricultural applications that relies on emerging connectivity solutions like citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) and satellite networks. BYON creates an agile connectivity solution that can be moved along a farm to create spatio-temporal connectivity bubbles. BYON incorporates a new gateway design that reacts to the presence of crops and optimizes coverage in agricultural settings. We evaluate BYON in a production farm and demonstrate its benefits.