Government
NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning
Jain, Neel, Chiang, Ping-yeh, Wen, Yuxin, Kirchenbauer, John, Chu, Hong-Min, Somepalli, Gowthami, Bartoldson, Brian R., Kailkhura, Bhavya, Schwarzschild, Avi, Saha, Aniruddha, Goldblum, Micah, Geiping, Jonas, Goldstein, Tom
We show that language model finetuning can be improved, sometimes dramatically, with a simple augmentation. NEFTune adds noise to the embedding vectors during training. Standard finetuning of LLaMA-2-7B using Alpaca achieves 29.79% on AlpacaEval, which rises to 64.69% using noisy embeddings. NEFTune also improves over strong baselines on modern instruction datasets. Models trained with Evol-Instruct see a 10% improvement, with ShareGPT an 8% improvement, and with OpenPlatypus an 8% improvement. Even powerful models further refined with RLHF such as LLaMA-2-Chat benefit from additional training with NEFTune. The ability of LLMs to follow detailed instructions is vital to their usefulness. Generative language models are typically trained on raw web data, and then subsequently fine-tuned on a comparatively small but carefully curated set of instruction data. Instruction fine-tuning is crucial to taming the power of LLMs, and the usefulness of a model is largely determined by our ability to get the most out of small instruction datasets. In this paper, we propose to add random noise to the embedding vectors of the training data during the forward pass of fine-tuning. We show that this simple trick can improve the outcome of instruction fine-tuning, often by a large margin, with no additional compute or data overhead. Noisy Embedding Instruction Fine Tuning (NEFTune), while simple, has a strong impact on downstream conversational quality. When a raw LLM like LLaMA-2-7B is finetuned with noisy embeddings, its performance on AlpacaEval improves from 29.8% to 64.7% (Figure 1) - an impressive boost of around 35 percentage points (Touvron et al., 2023b; Dubois et al., 2023). NEFTune leads to this surprising and large jump in performance on conversational tasks, maintaining performance on factual question answering baselines. This technique seems to be a free lunch for LLM fine-tuning. NEFTune leads to massive performance boosts across all of these datasets, showcasing the increased conversational quality of the generated answers. The earliest forms of instruction finetuning such as FLAN and T0 (Sanh et al., 2021; Wei et al., 2021) focused on cross-task generalization in language models. Encoder-decoder language models were finetuned on a broad range of NLP tasks (about 100) and then evaluated on a set of different tasks. This was later scaled up to include thousands of tasks, seeing further improvement over the original FLAN (Chung et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2022). Although these works showed that LLMs could be easily adapted to solve simple and classical NLP tasks, real-world scenarios require LLMs to provide free-form answers to open-ended queries. InstructGPT (Ouyang et al., 2022) was the first model to tackle open-ended queries with impressive performance. OpenAI further trained GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020) using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the model.
Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency
Zou, Andy, Phan, Long, Chen, Sarah, Campbell, James, Guo, Phillip, Ren, Richard, Pan, Alexander, Yin, Xuwang, Mazeika, Mantas, Dombrowski, Ann-Kathrin, Goel, Shashwat, Li, Nathaniel, Byun, Michael J., Wang, Zifan, Mallen, Alex, Basart, Steven, Koyejo, Sanmi, Song, Dawn, Fredrikson, Matt, Kolter, J. Zico, Hendrycks, Dan
In this paper, we identify and characterize the emerging area of representation engineering (RepE), an approach to enhancing the transparency of AI systems that draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience. RepE places population-level representations, rather than neurons or circuits, at the center of analysis, equipping us with novel methods for monitoring and manipulating high-level cognitive phenomena in deep neural networks (DNNs). We provide baselines and an initial analysis of RepE techniques, showing that they offer simple yet effective solutions for improving our understanding and control of large language models. We showcase how these methods can provide traction on a wide range of safety-relevant problems, including honesty, harmlessness, power-seeking, and more, demonstrating the promise of top-down transparency research. We hope that this work catalyzes further exploration of RepE and fosters advancements in the transparency and safety of AI systems.
LEEC: A Legal Element Extraction Dataset with an Extensive Domain-Specific Label System
Zongyue, Xue, Huanghai, Liu, Yiran, Hu, Kangle, Kong, Chenlu, Wang, Yun, Liu, Weixing, Shen
As a pivotal task in natural language processing, element extraction has gained significance in the legal domain. Extracting legal elements from judicial documents helps enhance interpretative and analytical capacities of legal cases, and thereby facilitating a wide array of downstream applications in various domains of law. Yet existing element extraction datasets are limited by their restricted access to legal knowledge and insufficient coverage of labels. To address this shortfall, we introduce a more comprehensive, large-scale criminal element extraction dataset, comprising 15,831 judicial documents and 159 labels. This dataset was constructed through two main steps: first, designing the label system by our team of legal experts based on prior legal research which identified critical factors driving and processes generating sentencing outcomes in criminal cases; second, employing the legal knowledge to annotate judicial documents according to the label system and annotation guideline. The Legal Element ExtraCtion dataset (LEEC) represents the most extensive and domain-specific legal element extraction dataset for the Chinese legal system. Leveraging the annotated data, we employed various SOTA models that validates the applicability of LEEC for Document Event Extraction (DEE) task. The LEEC dataset is available on https://github.com/THUlawtech/LEEC .
Red Teaming Game: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Red Teaming Language Models
Ma, Chengdong, Yang, Ziran, Gao, Minquan, Ci, Hai, Gao, Jun, Pan, Xuehai, Yang, Yaodong
Deployable Large Language Models (LLMs) must conform to the criterion of helpfulness and harmlessness, thereby achieving consistency between LLMs outputs and human values. Red-teaming techniques constitute a critical way towards this criterion. Existing work rely solely on manual red team designs and heuristic adversarial prompts for vulnerability detection and optimization. These approaches lack rigorous mathematical formulation, thus limiting the exploration of diverse attack strategy within quantifiable measure and optimization of LLMs under convergence guarantees. In this paper, we present Red-teaming Game (RTG), a general game-theoretic framework without manual annotation. RTG is designed for analyzing the multi-turn attack and defense interactions between Red-team language Models (RLMs) and Blue-team Language Model (BLM). Within the RTG, we propose Gamified Red-teaming Solver (GRTS) with diversity measure of the semantic space. GRTS is an automated red teaming technique to solve RTG towards Nash equilibrium through meta-game analysis, which corresponds to the theoretically guaranteed optimization direction of both RLMs and BLM. Empirical results in multi-turn attacks with RLMs show that GRTS autonomously discovered diverse attack strategies and effectively improved security of LLMs, outperforming existing heuristic red-team designs. Overall, RTG has established a foundational framework for red teaming tasks and constructed a new scalable oversight technique for alignment.
What Learned Representations and Influence Functions Can Tell Us About Adversarial Examples
Tonni, Shakila Mahjabin, Dras, Mark
Adversarial examples, deliberately crafted using small perturbations to fool deep neural networks, were first studied in image processing and more recently in NLP. While approaches to detecting adversarial examples in NLP have largely relied on search over input perturbations, image processing has seen a range of techniques that aim to characterise adversarial subspaces over the learned representations. In this paper, we adapt two such approaches to NLP, one based on nearest neighbors and influence functions and one on Mahalanobis distances. The former in particular produces a state-of-the-art detector when compared against several strong baselines; moreover, the novel use of influence functions provides insight into how the nature of adversarial example subspaces in NLP relate to those in image processing, and also how they differ depending on the kind of NLP task.
Multi-Robot Patrol Algorithm with Distributed Coordination and Consciousness of the Base Station's Situation Awareness
Kobayashi, Kazuho, Ueno, Seiya, Higuchi, Takehiro
Multi-robot patrolling is the potential application for robotic systems to survey wide areas efficiently without human burdens and mistakes. However, such systems have few examples of real-world applications due to their lack of human predictability. This paper proposes an algorithm: Local Reactive (LR) for multi-robot patrolling to satisfy both needs: (i)patrol efficiently and (ii)provide humans with better situation awareness to enhance system predictability. Each robot operating according to the proposed algorithm selects its patrol target from the local areas around the robot's current location by two requirements: (i)patrol location with greater need, (ii)report its achievements to the base station. The algorithm is distributed and coordinates the robots without centralized control by sharing their patrol achievements and degree of need to report to the base station. The proposed algorithm performed better than existing algorithms in both patrolling and the base station's situation awareness.
A Generalised Theory of Proportionality in Collective Decision Making
Masařík, Tomáš, Pierczyński, Grzegorz, Skowron, Piotr
We consider a voting model, where a number of candidates need to be selected subject to certain feasibility constraints. The model generalises committee elections (where there is a single constraint on the number of candidates that need to be selected), various elections with diversity constraints, the model of public decisions (where decisions needs to be taken on a number of independent issues), and the model of collective scheduling. A critical property of voting is that it should be fair -- not only to individuals but also to groups of voters with similar opinions on the subject of the vote; in other words, the outcome of an election should proportionally reflect the voters' preferences. We formulate axioms of proportionality in this general model. Our axioms do not require predefining groups of voters; to the contrary, we ensure that the opinion of every subset of voters whose preferences are cohesive-enough are taken into account to the extent that is proportional to the size of the subset. Our axioms generalise the strongest known satisfiable axioms for the more specific models. We explain how to adapt two prominent committee election rules, Proportional Approval Voting (PAV) and Phragm\'{e}n Sequential Rule, as well as the concept of stable-priceability to our general model. The two rules satisfy our proportionality axioms if and only if the feasibility constraints are matroids.
Graph-based methods coupled with specific distributional distances for adversarial attack detection
Nwaigwe, Dwight, Carboni, Lucrezia, Mermillod, Martial, Achard, Sophie, Dojat, Michel
Artificial neural networks are prone to being fooled by carefully perturbed inputs which cause an egregious misclassification. These \textit{adversarial} attacks have been the focus of extensive research. Likewise, there has been an abundance of research in ways to detect and defend against them. We introduce a novel approach of detection and interpretation of adversarial attacks from a graph perspective. For an input image, we compute an associated sparse graph using the layer-wise relevance propagation algorithm \cite{bach15}. Specifically, we only keep edges of the neural network with the highest relevance values. Three quantities are then computed from the graph which are then compared against those computed from the training set. The result of the comparison is a classification of the image as benign or adversarial. To make the comparison, two classification methods are introduced: 1) an explicit formula based on Wasserstein distance applied to the degree of node and 2) a logistic regression. Both classification methods produce strong results which lead us to believe that a graph-based interpretation of adversarial attacks is valuable.
Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction
Yuan, Siyu, Chen, Jiangjie, Ge, Xuyang, Xiao, Yanghua, Yang, Deqing
The vital role of analogical reasoning in human cognition allows us to grasp novel concepts by linking them with familiar ones through shared relational structures. Despite the attention previous research has given to word analogies, this work suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) often overlook the structures that underpin these analogies, raising questions about the efficacy of word analogies as a measure of analogical reasoning skills akin to human cognition. In response to this, our paper introduces a task of analogical structure abduction, grounded in cognitive psychology, designed to abduce structures that form an analogy between two systems. In support of this task, we establish a benchmark called SCAR, containing 400 scientific analogies from 13 distinct fields, tailored for evaluating analogical reasoning with structure abduction. The empirical evidence underlines the continued challenges faced by LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, in mastering this task, signifying the need for future exploration to enhance their abilities.
Statistical properties and privacy guarantees of an original distance-based fully synthetic data generation method
Chapelle, Rémy, Falissard, Bruno
Introduction: The amount of data generated by original research is growing exponentially. Publicly releasing them is recommended to comply with the Open Science principles. However, data collected from human participants cannot be released as-is without raising privacy concerns. Fully synthetic data represent a promising answer to this challenge. This approach is explored by the French Centre de Recherche en {\'E}pid{\'e}miologie et Sant{\'e} des Populations in the form of a synthetic data generation framework based on Classification and Regression Trees and an original distance-based filtering. The goal of this work was to develop a refined version of this framework and to assess its risk-utility profile with empirical and formal tools, including novel ones developed for the purpose of this evaluation.Materials and Methods: Our synthesis framework consists of four successive steps, each of which is designed to prevent specific risks of disclosure. We assessed its performance by applying two or more of these steps to a rich epidemiological dataset. Privacy and utility metrics were computed for each of the resulting synthetic datasets, which were further assessed using machine learning approaches.Results: Computed metrics showed a satisfactory level of protection against attribute disclosure attacks for each synthetic dataset, especially when the full framework was used. Membership disclosure attacks were formally prevented without significantly altering the data. Machine learning approaches showed a low risk of success for simulated singling out and linkability attacks. Distributional and inferential similarity with the original data were high with all datasets.Discussion: This work showed the technical feasibility of generating publicly releasable synthetic data using a multi-step framework. Formal and empirical tools specifically developed for this demonstration are a valuable contribution to this field. Further research should focus on the extension and validation of these tools, in an effort to specify the intrinsic qualities of alternative data synthesis methods.Conclusion: By successfully assessing the quality of data produced using a novel multi-step synthetic data generation framework, we showed the technical and conceptual soundness of the Open-CESP initiative, which seems ripe for full-scale implementation.