Recent studies have found that summaries generated by large language models (LLMs) are favored by human annotators over the original reference summaries in commonly used summarization datasets. Therefore, we investigate a new learning setting of text summarization models that considers the LLMs as the reference or the gold-standard oracle on these datasets. To examine the standard practices that are aligned with this new learning setting, we investigate two LLM-based summary quality evaluation methods for model training and adopt a contrastive learning training method to leverage the LLM-guided learning signals. Our experiments on the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets demonstrate that smaller summarization models can achieve similar performance as LLMs under LLM-based evaluation. However, we found that the smaller models can not yet reach LLM-level performance under human evaluation despite promising improvements brought by our proposed training methods. Meanwhile, we perform a meta-analysis on this new learning setting that reveals a discrepancy between human and LLM-based evaluation, highlighting the benefits and risks of this LLM-as-reference setting we investigated.

Modern Large language models (LLMs) can still generate responses that may not be aligned with human expectations or values. While many weight-based alignment methods have been proposed, many of them still leave models vulnerable to attacks when used on their own. To help mitigate this issue, we introduce Bergeron, a framework designed to improve the robustness of LLMs against adversarial attacks. Bergeron employs a two-tiered architecture. Here, a secondary LLM serves as a simulated conscience that safeguards a primary LLM. We do this by monitoring for and correcting potentially harmful text within both the prompt inputs and the generated outputs of the primary LLM. Empirical evaluation shows that Bergeron can improve the alignment and robustness of several popular LLMs without costly fine-tuning. It aids both open-source and black-box LLMs by complementing and reinforcing their existing alignment training.

In the context of information systems, text sanitization techniques are used to identify and remove sensitive data to comply with security and regulatory requirements. Even though many methods for privacy preservation have been proposed, most of them are focused on the detection of entities from specific domains (e.g., credit card numbers, social security numbers), lacking generality and requiring customization for each desirable domain. Moreover, removing words is, in general, a drastic measure, as it can degrade text coherence and contextual information. Less severe measures include substituting a word for a safe alternative, yet it can be challenging to automatically find meaningful substitutions. We present a zero-shot text sanitization technique that detects and substitutes potentially sensitive information using Large Language Models. Our evaluation shows that our method excels at protecting privacy while maintaining text coherence and contextual information, preserving data utility for downstream tasks.

Human moderation of online conversation is essential to maintaining civility and focus in a dialogue, but is challenging to scale and harmful to moderators. The inclusion of sophisticated natural language generation modules as a force multiplier aid moderators is a tantalizing prospect, but adequate evaluation approaches have so far been elusive. In this paper, we establish a systematic definition of conversational moderation effectiveness through a multidisciplinary lens that incorporates insights from social science. We then propose a comprehensive evaluation framework that uses this definition to asses models' moderation capabilities independently of human intervention. With our framework, we conduct the first known study Figure 1: While banning users or deleting their comments of conversational dialogue models as moderators, may push them towards echo chambers (left), conversational finding that appropriately prompted models moderation can guide users towards more can provide specific and fair feedback on constructive behavior (right). Recent developments in toxic behavior but struggle to influence users to conversational AI present an opportunity to perform this increase their levels of respect and cooperation.

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable progress across various general domains, encounter significant barriers in medicine and healthcare. This field faces unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and the reasoning over specialized knowledge. To address these obstinate issues, we propose a novel Multi-disciplinary Collaboration (MC) framework for the medical domain that leverages role-playing LLM-based agents who participate in a collaborative multi-round discussion, thereby enhancing LLM proficiency and reasoning capabilities. This training-free and interpretable framework encompasses five critical steps: gathering domain experts, proposing individual analyses, summarising these analyses into a report, iterating over discussions until a consensus is reached, and ultimately making a decision. Our work particularly focuses on the zero-shot scenario, our results on nine data sets (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and six subtasks from MMLU) establish that our proposed MC framework excels at mining and harnessing the medical expertise in LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. Based on these outcomes, we further conduct a human evaluation to pinpoint and categorize common errors within our method, as well as ablation studies aimed at understanding the impact of various factors on overall performance.

The training of large language models (LLMs) on extensive, unfiltered corpora sourced from the internet is a common and advantageous practice. Consequently, LLMs have learned and inadvertently reproduced various types of biases, including violent, offensive, and toxic language. However, recent research shows that generative pretrained transformer (GPT) language models can recognize their own biases and detect toxicity in generated content, a process referred to as self-diagnosis. In response, researchers have developed a decoding algorithm that allows LLMs to self-debias, or reduce their likelihood of generating harmful text. This study investigates the efficacy of the diagnosing-debiasing approach in mitigating two additional types of biases: insults and political bias. These biases are often used interchangeably in discourse, despite exhibiting potentially dissimilar semantic and syntactic properties. We aim to contribute to the ongoing effort of investigating the ethical and social implications of human-AI interaction.

Modeling environmental ecosystems is critical for the sustainability of our planet, but is extremely challenging due to the complex underlying processes driven by interactions amongst a large number of physical variables. As many variables are difficult to measure at large scales, existing works often utilize a combination of observable features and locally available measurements or modeled values as input to build models for a specific study region and time period. This raises a fundamental question in advancing the modeling of environmental ecosystems: how to build a general framework for modeling the complex relationships amongst various environmental data over space and time? In this paper, we introduce a new framework, FREE, which maps available environmental data into a text space and then converts the traditional predictive modeling task in environmental science to the semantic recognition problem. The proposed FREE framework leverages recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) to supplement the original input features with natural language descriptions. This facilitates capturing the data semantics and also allows harnessing the irregularities of input features. When used for long-term prediction, FREE has the flexibility to incorporate newly collected observations to enhance future prediction. The efficacy of FREE is evaluated in the context of two societally important real-world applications, predicting stream water temperature in the Delaware River Basin and predicting annual corn yield in Illinois and Iowa. Beyond the superior predictive performance over multiple baseline methods, FREE is shown to be more data- and computation-efficient as it can be pre-trained on simulated data generated by physics-based models.

A novel approach is presented for discovering PDEs that govern the motion of satellites in space. The method is based on SINDy, a data-driven technique capable of identifying the underlying dynamics of complex physical systems from time series data. SINDy is utilized to uncover PDEs that describe the laws of physics in space, which are non-deterministic and influenced by various factors such as drag or the reference area (related to the attitude of the satellite). In contrast to prior works, the physically interpretable coordinate system is maintained, and no dimensionality reduction technique is applied to the data. By training the model with multiple representative trajectories of LEO - encompassing various inclinations, eccentricities, and altitudes - and testing it with unseen orbital motion patterns, a mean error of around 140 km for the positions and 0.12 km/s for the velocities is achieved. The method offers the advantage of delivering interpretable, accurate, and complex models of orbital motion that can be employed for propagation or as inputs to predictive models for other variables of interest, such as atmospheric drag or the probability of collision in an encounter with a spacecraft or space objects. In conclusion, the work demonstrates the promising potential of using SINDy to discover the equations governing the behaviour of satellites in space. The technique has been successfully applied to uncover PDEs describing the motion of satellites in LEO with high accuracy. The method possesses several advantages over traditional models, including the ability to provide physically interpretable, accurate, and complex models of orbital motion derived from high-entropy datasets. These models can be utilised for propagation or as inputs to predictive models for other variables of interest.

Reasoning about safety, security, and other dependability attributes of autonomous systems is a challenge that needs to be addressed before the adoption of such systems in day-to-day life. Formal methods is a class of methods that mathematically reason about a system's behavior. Thus, a correctness proof is sufficient to conclude the system's dependability. However, these methods are usually applied to abstract models of the system, which might not fully represent the actual system. Fault injection, on the other hand, is a testing method to evaluate the dependability of systems. However, the amount of testing required to evaluate the system is rather large and often a problem. This vision paper introduces formal fault injection, a fusion of these two techniques throughout the development lifecycle to enhance the dependability of autonomous systems. We advocate for a more cohesive approach by identifying five areas of mutual support between formal methods and fault injection. By forging stronger ties between the two fields, we pave the way for developing safe and dependable autonomous systems. This paper delves into the integration's potential and outlines future research avenues, addressing open challenges along the way.

This paper investigates learning effects and human operator training practices in variable autonomy robotic systems. These factors are known to affect performance of a human-robot system and are frequently overlooked. We present the results from an experiment inspired by a search and rescue scenario in which operators remotely controlled a mobile robot with either Human-Initiative (HI) or Mixed-Initiative (MI) control. Evidence suggests learning in terms of primary navigation task and secondary (distractor) task performance. Further evidence is provided that MI and HI performance in a pure navigation task is equal. Lastly, guidelines are proposed for experimental design and operator training practices.