In recent years, large language models (LMs) have achieved remarkable progress across various natural language processing tasks. As pre-training and fine-tuning are costly and might negatively impact model performance, it is desired to efficiently adapt an existing model to different conditions such as styles, sentiments or narratives, when facing different audiences or scenarios. However, efficient adaptation of a language model to diverse conditions remains an open challenge. This work is inspired by the observation that text conditions are often associated with selection of certain words in a context. Therefore we introduce LM-Switch, a theoretically grounded, lightweight and simple method for generative language model conditioning. We begin by investigating the effect of conditions in Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), and establish a theoretical connection with language model. Our finding suggests that condition shifts in HMMs are associated with linear transformations in word embeddings. LM-Switch is then designed to deploy a learnable linear factor in the word embedding space for language model conditioning. We show that LM-Switch can model diverse tasks, and achieves comparable or better performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines in LM detoxification and generation control, despite requiring no more than 1% of parameters compared with baselines and little extra time overhead compared with base LMs. It is also able to learn from as few as a few sentences or one document. Moreover, a learned LM-Switch can be transferred to other LMs of different sizes, achieving a detoxification performance similar to the best baseline. We will make our code available to the research community following publication.

Augmented Language Models (ALMs) blend the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with tools that allow for knowledge retrieval and action execution. Existing ALM systems trigger LLM thought processes while pulling observations from these tools in an interleaved fashion. Specifically, an LLM reasons to call an external tool, gets halted to fetch the tool's response, and then decides the next action based on all preceding response tokens. Such a paradigm, though straightforward and easy to implement, often leads to huge computation complexity from redundant prompts and repeated execution. This study addresses such challenges for the first time, proposing a modular paradigm ReWOO (Reasoning WithOut Observation) that detaches the reasoning process from external observations, thus significantly reducing token consumption. Comprehensive evaluations across six public NLP benchmarks and a curated dataset reveal consistent performance enhancements with our proposed methodology. Notably, ReWOO achieves 5x token efficiency and 4% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA, a multi-step reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, ReWOO demonstrates robustness under tool-failure scenarios. Beyond prompt efficiency, decoupling parametric modules from non-parametric tool calls enables instruction fine-tuning to offload LLMs into smaller language models, thus substantially reducing model parameters. Our illustrative work offloads reasoning ability from 175B GPT3.5 into 7B LLaMA, demonstrating the significant potential for truly efficient and scalable ALM systems.

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 precipitated a panic among some educators while prompting qualified enthusiasm from others. Under the umbrella term Generative AI, ChatGPT is an example of a range of technologies for the delivery of computer-generated text, image, and other digitized media. This paper examines the implications for education of one generative AI technology, chatbots responding from large language models, or C-LLM. It reports on an application of a C-LLM to AI review and assessment of complex student work. In a concluding discussion, the paper explores the intrinsic limits of generative AI, bound as it is to language corpora and their textual representation through binary notation. Within these limits, we suggest the range of emerging and potential applications of Generative AI in education.

The generative AI revolution in recent years has been spurred by an expansion in compute power and data quantity, which together enable extensive pre-training of powerful text-to-image (T2I) models. With their greater capabilities to generate realistic and creative content, these T2I models like DALL-E, MidJourney, Imagen or Stable Diffusion are reaching ever wider audiences. Any unsafe behaviors inherited from pretraining on uncurated internet-scraped datasets thus have the potential to cause wide-reaching harm, for example, through generated images which are violent, sexually explicit, or contain biased and derogatory stereotypes. Despite this risk of harm, we lack systematic and structured evaluation datasets to scrutinize model behavior, especially adversarial attacks that bypass existing safety filters. A typical bottleneck in safety evaluation is achieving a wide coverage of different types of challenging examples in the evaluation set, i.e., identifying 'unknown unknowns' or long-tail problems. To address this need, we introduce the Adversarial Nibbler challenge. The goal of this challenge is to crowdsource a diverse set of failure modes and reward challenge participants for successfully finding safety vulnerabilities in current state-of-the-art T2I models. Ultimately, we aim to provide greater awareness of these issues and assist developers in improving the future safety and reliability of generative AI models. Adversarial Nibbler is a data-centric challenge, part of the DataPerf challenge suite, organized and supported by Kaggle and MLCommons.

A prominent weakness of modern language models (LMs) is their tendency to generate factually incorrect text, which hinders their usability. A natural question is whether such factual errors can be detected automatically. Inspired by truth-seeking mechanisms in law, we propose a factuality evaluation framework for LMs that is based on cross-examination. Our key idea is that an incorrect claim is likely to result in inconsistency with other claims that the model generates. To discover such inconsistencies, we facilitate a multi-turn interaction between the LM that generated the claim and another LM (acting as an examiner) which introduces questions to discover inconsistencies. We empirically evaluate our method on factual claims made by multiple recent LMs on four benchmarks, finding that it outperforms existing methods and baselines, often by a large gap. Our results demonstrate the potential of using interacting LMs for capturing factual errors.

Previous studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) like GPTs store massive factual knowledge in their parameters. However, the stored knowledge could be false or out-dated. Traditional knowledge editing methods refine LLMs via fine-tuning on texts containing specific knowledge. However, with the increasing scales of LLMs, these gradient-based approaches bring large computation costs. The trend of model-as-a-service also makes it impossible to modify knowledge in black-box LMs. Inspired by in-context learning (ICL), a new paradigm based on demonstration contexts without parameter updating, we explore whether ICL can edit factual knowledge. To answer this question, we give a comprehensive empirical study of ICL strategies. Experiments show that in-context knowledge editing (IKE), without any gradient and parameter updating, achieves a competitive success rate compared to gradient-based methods on GPT-J (6B) but with much fewer side effects, including less over-editing on similar but unrelated facts and less knowledge forgetting on previously stored knowledge. We also apply the method to larger LMs with tens or hundreds of parameters like OPT-175B, which shows the scalability of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Zce1112zslx/IKE.

In this work, we conduct a detailed analysis on the performance of legal-oriented pre-trained language models (PLMs). We examine the interplay between their original objective, acquired knowledge, and legal language understanding capacities which we define as the upstream, probing, and downstream performance, respectively. We consider not only the models' size but also the pre-training corpora used as important dimensions in our study. To this end, we release a multinational English legal corpus (LeXFiles) and a legal knowledge probing benchmark (LegalLAMA) to facilitate training and detailed analysis of legal-oriented PLMs. We release two new legal PLMs trained on LeXFiles and evaluate them alongside others on LegalLAMA and LexGLUE. We find that probing performance strongly correlates with upstream performance in related legal topics. On the other hand, downstream performance is mainly driven by the model's size and prior legal knowledge which can be estimated by upstream and probing performance. Based on these findings, we can conclude that both dimensions are important for those seeking the development of domain-specific PLMs.

In several regions across the globe, snow has a significant impact on hydrology. The amounts of water that infiltrate the ground and flow as runoff are driven by the melting of snow. Therefore, it is crucial to study the magnitude and effect of snowmelt. Snow droughts, resulting from reduced snow storage, can drastically impact the water supplies in basins where snow predominates, such as in the western United States. Hence, it is important to detect the time and severity of snow droughts efficiently. We propose Snow Drought Response Index or SnoDRI, a novel indicator that could be used to identify and quantify snow drought occurrences. Our index is calculated using cutting-edge ML algorithms from various snow-related variables. The self-supervised learning of an autoencoder is combined with mutual information in the model. In this study, we use random forests for feature extraction for SnoDRI and assess the importance of each variable. We use reanalysis data (NLDAS-2) from 1981 to 2021 for the Pacific United States to study the efficacy of the new snow drought index. We evaluate the index by confirming the coincidence of its interpretation and the actual snow drought incidents.

Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.

A major risk of using language models in practical applications is their tendency to hallucinate incorrect statements. Hallucinations are often attributed to knowledge gaps in LMs, but we hypothesize that in some cases, when justifying previously generated hallucinations, LMs output false claims that they can separately recognize as incorrect. We construct three question-answering datasets where ChatGPT and GPT-4 often state an incorrect answer and offer an explanation with at least one incorrect claim. Crucially, we find that ChatGPT and GPT-4 can identify 67% and 87% of their own mistakes, respectively. We refer to this phenomenon as hallucination snowballing: an LM over-commits to early mistakes, leading to more mistakes that it otherwise would not make.