Government
LLM-Driven Robots Risk Enacting Discrimination, Violence, and Unlawful Actions
Azeem, Rumaisa, Hundt, Andrew, Mansouri, Masoumeh, Brandão, Martim
Members of the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) communities have proposed Large Language Models (LLMs) as a promising resource for robotics tasks such as natural language interactions, doing household and workplace tasks, approximating `common sense reasoning', and modeling humans. However, recent research has raised concerns about the potential for LLMs to produce discriminatory outcomes and unsafe behaviors in real-world robot experiments and applications. To address these concerns, we conduct an HRI-based evaluation of discrimination and safety criteria on several highly-rated LLMs. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs currently lack robustness when encountering people across a diverse range of protected identity characteristics (e.g., race, gender, disability status, nationality, religion, and their intersections), producing biased outputs consistent with directly discriminatory outcomes -- e.g. `gypsy' and `mute' people are labeled untrustworthy, but not `european' or `able-bodied' people. Furthermore, we test models in settings with unconstrained natural language (open vocabulary) inputs, and find they fail to act safely, generating responses that accept dangerous, violent, or unlawful instructions -- such as incident-causing misstatements, taking people's mobility aids, and sexual predation. Our results underscore the urgent need for systematic, routine, and comprehensive risk assessments and assurances to improve outcomes and ensure LLMs only operate on robots when it is safe, effective, and just to do so. Data and code will be made available.
How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States
Zhou, Zhenhong, Yu, Haiyang, Zhang, Xinghua, Xu, Rongwu, Huang, Fei, Li, Yongbin
Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM safety. Due to language models with intensive parameters often regarded as black boxes, the mechanisms of alignment and jailbreak are challenging to elucidate. In this paper, we employ weak classifiers to explain LLM safety through the intermediate hidden states. We first confirm that LLMs learn ethical concepts during pre-training rather than alignment and can identify malicious and normal inputs in the early layers. Alignment actually associates the early concepts with emotion guesses in the middle layers and then refines them to the specific reject tokens for safe generations. Jailbreak disturbs the transformation of early unethical classification into negative emotions. We conduct experiments on models from 7B to 70B across various model families to prove our conclusion. Overall, our paper indicates the intrinsical mechanism of LLM safety and how jailbreaks circumvent safety guardrails, offering a new perspective on LLM safety and reducing concerns. Our code is available at https://github.com/ydyjya/LLM-IHS-Explanation.
TGB 2.0: A Benchmark for Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Heterogeneous Graphs
Gastinger, Julia, Huang, Shenyang, Galkin, Mikhail, Loghmani, Erfan, Parviz, Ali, Poursafaei, Farimah, Danovitch, Jacob, Rossi, Emanuele, Koutis, Ioannis, Stuckenschmidt, Heiner, Rabbany, Reihaneh, Rabusseau, Guillaume
Multi-relational temporal graphs are powerful tools for modeling real-world data, capturing the evolving and interconnected nature of entities over time. Recently, many novel models are proposed for ML on such graphs intensifying the need for robust evaluation and standardized benchmark datasets. However, the availability of such resources remains scarce and evaluation faces added complexity due to reproducibility issues in experimental protocols. To address these challenges, we introduce Temporal Graph Benchmark 2.0 (TGB 2.0), a novel benchmarking framework tailored for evaluating methods for predicting future links on Temporal Knowledge Graphs and Temporal Heterogeneous Graphs with a focus on large-scale datasets, extending the Temporal Graph Benchmark. TGB 2.0 facilitates comprehensive evaluations by presenting eight novel datasets spanning five domains with up to 53 million edges. TGB 2.0 datasets are significantly larger than existing datasets in terms of number of nodes, edges, or timestamps. In addition, TGB 2.0 provides a reproducible and realistic evaluation pipeline for multi-relational temporal graphs. Through extensive experimentation, we observe that 1) leveraging edge-type information is crucial to obtain high performance, 2) simple heuristic baselines are often competitive with more complex methods, 3) most methods fail to run on our largest datasets, highlighting the need for research on more scalable methods.
Reinforced Compressive Neural Architecture Search for Versatile Adversarial Robustness
Wang, Dingrong, Sapkota, Hitesh, Tao, Zhiqiang, Yu, Qi
Prior neural architecture search (NAS) for adversarial robustness works have discovered that a lightweight and adversarially robust neural network architecture could exist in a non-robust large teacher network, generally disclosed by heuristic rules through statistical analysis and neural architecture search, generally disclosed by heuristic rules from neural architecture search. However, heuristic methods cannot uniformly handle different adversarial attacks and "teacher" network capacity. To solve this challenge, we propose a Reinforced Compressive Neural Architecture Search (RC-NAS) for Versatile Adversarial Robustness. Specifically, we define task settings that compose datasets, adversarial attacks, and teacher network information. Given diverse tasks, we conduct a novel dual-level training paradigm that consists of a meta-training and a fine-tuning phase to effectively expose the RL agent to diverse attack scenarios (in meta-training), and making it adapt quickly to locate a sub-network (in fine-tuning) for any previously unseen scenarios. Experiments show that our framework could achieve adaptive compression towards different initial teacher networks, datasets, and adversarial attacks, resulting in more lightweight and adversarially robust architectures.
Are EEG-to-Text Models Working?
Jo, Hyejeong, Yang, Yiqian, Han, Juhyeok, Duan, Yiqun, Xiong, Hui, Lee, Won Hee
This work critically analyzes existing models for open-vocabulary EEG-to-Text translation. We identify a crucial limitation: previous studies often employed implicit teacher-forcing during evaluation, artificially inflating performance metrics. Additionally, they lacked a critical benchmark - comparing model performance on pure noise inputs. We propose a methodology to differentiate between models that truly learn from EEG signals and those that simply memorize training data. Our analysis reveals that model performance on noise data can be comparable to that on EEG data. These findings highlight the need for stricter evaluation practices in EEG-to-Text research, emphasizing transparent reporting and rigorous benchmarking with noise inputs. This approach will lead to more reliable assessments of model capabilities and pave the way for robust EEG-to-Text communication systems.
FreeCtrl: Constructing Control Centers with Feedforward Layers for Learning-Free Controllable Text Generation
Feng, Zijian, Zhou, Hanzhang, Zhu, Zixiao, Mao, Kezhi
Controllable text generation (CTG) seeks to craft texts adhering to specific attributes, traditionally employing learning-based techniques such as training, fine-tuning, or prefix-tuning with attribute-specific datasets. These approaches, while effective, demand extensive computational and data resources. In contrast, some proposed learning-free alternatives circumvent learning but often yield inferior results, exemplifying the fundamental machine learning trade-off between computational expense and model efficacy. To overcome these limitations, we propose FreeCtrl, a learning-free approach that dynamically adjusts the weights of selected feedforward neural network (FFN) vectors to steer the outputs of large language models (LLMs). FreeCtrl hinges on the principle that the weights of different FFN vectors influence the likelihood of different tokens appearing in the output. By identifying and adaptively adjusting the weights of attribute-related FFN vectors, FreeCtrl can control the output likelihood of attribute keywords in the generated content. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-attribute control reveal that the learning-free FreeCtrl outperforms other learning-free and learning-based methods, successfully resolving the dilemma between learning costs and model performance.
Automatically Labeling $200B Life-Saving Datasets: A Large Clinical Trial Outcome Benchmark
Gao, Chufan, Pradeepkumar, Jathurshan, Das, Trisha, Thati, Shivashankar, Sun, Jimeng
The global cost of drug discovery and development exceeds $200 billion annually. The main results of drug discovery and development are the outcomes of clinical trials, which directly influence the regulatory approval of new drug candidates and ultimately affect patient outcomes. Despite their significance, large-scale, high-quality clinical trial outcome data are not readily available to the public. Suppose a large clinical trial outcome dataset is provided; machine learning researchers can potentially develop accurate prediction models using past trials and outcome labels, which could help prioritize and optimize therapeutic programs, ultimately benefiting patients. This paper introduces Clinical Trial Outcome (CTO) dataset, the largest trial outcome dataset with around 479K clinical trials, aggregating outcomes from multiple sources of weakly supervised labels, minimizing the noise from individual sources, and eliminating the need for human annotation. These sources include large language model (LLM) decisions on trial-related documents, news headline sentiments, stock prices of trial sponsors, trial linkages across phases, and other signals such as patient dropout rates and adverse events. CTO's labels show unprecedented agreement with supervised clinical trial outcome labels from test split of the supervised TOP dataset, with a 91 F1.
Computer vision-based model for detecting turning lane features on Florida's public roadways
Antwi, Richard Boadu, Takyi, Samuel, Michael, Kimollo, Karaer, Alican, Ozguven, Eren Erman, Moses, Ren, Dulebenets, Maxim A., Sando, Thobias
Efficient and current roadway geometry data collection is a critical task for transportation agencies to undertake effective road planning, maintenance, design, and rehabilitation efforts. The methods for gathering such data can be broadly classified into two categories: a) land-based methods, which encompass field inventory, mobile mapping, and image logging, and b) aerial-based methods, which involve satellite imagery, drones, and laser scanning. However, employing land-based techniques for extensive highway networks covering thousands of miles proves arduous and costly, and poses safety risks for crew members. Consequently, there exists a pressing need to develop more efficient methodologies for acquiring this data promptly, safely, and economically. Fortunately, with the increasing availability of high-resolution images and recent strides in computer vision and object detection technologies, automated extraction of roadway geometry features has become feasible.
Newswire: A Large-Scale Structured Database of a Century of Historical News
Silcock, Emily, Arora, Abhishek, D'Amico-Wong, Luca, Dell, Melissa
In the U.S. historically, local newspapers drew their content largely from newswires like the Associated Press. Historians argue that newswires played a pivotal role in creating a national identity and shared understanding of the world, but there is no comprehensive archive of the content sent over newswires. We reconstruct such an archive by applying a customized deep learning pipeline to hundreds of terabytes of raw image scans from thousands of local newspapers. The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model. To construct the Newswire dataset, we first recognize newspaper layouts and transcribe around 138 millions structured article texts from raw image scans. We then use a customized neural bi-encoder model to de-duplicate reproduced articles, in the presence of considerable abridgement and noise, quantifying how widely each article was reproduced. A text classifier is used to ensure that we only include newswire articles, which historically are in the public domain. The structured data that accompany the texts provide rich information about the who (disambiguated individuals), what (topics), and where (georeferencing) of the news that millions of Americans read over the course of a century. We also include Library of Congress metadata information about the newspapers that ran the articles on their front pages. The Newswire dataset is useful both for large language modeling - expanding training data beyond what is available from modern web texts - and for studying a diversity of questions in computational linguistics, social science, and the digital humanities.
Human-Robot Interface for Teleoperated Robotized Planetary Sample Collection and Assembly
Pagliara, Lorenzo, Petrone, Vincenzo, Ferrentino, Enrico, Chiacchio, Pasquale
As human space exploration evolves toward longer voyages farther from our home planet, in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) becomes increasingly important. Haptic teleoperations are one of the technologies by which such activities can be carried out remotely by humans, whose expertise is still necessary for complex activities. In order to perform precision tasks with effectiveness, the operator must experience ease of use and accuracy. The same features are demanded to reduce the complexity of the training procedures and the associated learning time for operators without a specific background in robotic teleoperations. Haptic teleoperation systems, that allow for a natural feeling of forces, need to cope with the trade-off between accurate movements and workspace extension. Clearly, both of them are required for typical ISRU tasks. In this work, we develop a new concept of operations and suitable human-robot interfaces to achieve sample collection and assembly with ease of use and accuracy. In the proposed operational concept, the teleoperation space is extended by executing automated trajectories, offline planned at the control station. In three different experimental scenarios, we validate the end-to-end system involving the control station and the robotic asset, by assessing the contribution of haptics to mission success, the system robustness to consistent delays, and the ease of training new operators.