Large Language Model
Remedy: Learning Machine Translation Evaluation from Human Preferences with Reward Modeling
A key challenge in MT evaluation is the inherent noise and inconsistency of human ratings. Regression-based neural metrics struggle with this noise, while prompting LLMs shows promise at system-level evaluation but performs poorly at segment level. In this work, we propose ReMedy, a novel MT metric framework that reformulates translation evaluation as a reward modeling task. Instead of regressing on imperfect human ratings directly, ReMedy learns relative translation quality using pairwise preference data, resulting in a more reliable evaluation. In extensive experiments across WMT22-24 shared tasks (39 language pairs, 111 MT systems), ReMedy achieves state-of-the-art performance at both segment- and system-level evaluation. Specifically, ReMedy-9B surpasses larger WMT winners and massive closed LLMs such as MetricX-13B, XCOMET-Ensemble, GEMBA-GPT-4, PaLM-540B, and finetuned PaLM2. Further analyses demonstrate that ReMedy delivers superior capability in detecting translation errors and evaluating low-quality translations.
Divergent LLM Adoption and Heterogeneous Convergence Paths in Research Writing
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are reshaping content creation and academic writing. This study investigates the impact of AI-assisted generative revisions on research manuscripts, focusing on heterogeneous adoption patterns and their influence on writing convergence. Leveraging a dataset of over 627,000 academic papers from arXiv, we develop a novel classification framework by fine-tuning prompt- and discipline-specific large language models to detect the style of ChatGPT-revised texts. Our findings reveal substantial disparities in LLM adoption across academic disciplines, gender, native language status, and career stage, alongside a rapid evolution in scholarly writing styles. Moreover, LLM usage enhances clarity, conciseness, and adherence to formal writing conventions, with improvements varying by revision type. Finally, a difference-in-differences analysis shows that while LLMs drive convergence in academic writing, early adopters, male researchers, non-native speakers, and junior scholars exhibit the most pronounced stylistic shifts, aligning their writing more closely with that of established researchers.
Continual Pre-Training is (not) What You Need in Domain Adaption
Chen, Pin-Er, Lian, Da-Chen, Hsieh, Shu-Kai, Huang, Sieh-Chuen, Shao, Hsuan-Lei, Chiu, Jun-Wei, Lin, Yang-Hsien, Chen, Zih-Ching, Cheng-Kuang, null, Huang, Eddie TC, See, Simon
The recent advances in Legal Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape of legal research and practice by automating tasks, enhancing research precision, and supporting complex decision-making processes. However, effectively adapting LLMs to the legal domain remains challenging due to the complexity of legal reasoning, the need for precise interpretation of specialized language, and the potential for hallucinations. This paper examines the efficacy of Domain-Adaptive Continual Pre-Training (DACP) in improving the legal reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Through a series of experiments on legal reasoning tasks within the Taiwanese legal framework, we demonstrate that while DACP enhances domain-specific knowledge, it does not uniformly improve performance across all legal tasks. We discuss the trade-offs involved in DACP, particularly its impact on model generalization and performance in prompt-based tasks, and propose directions for future research to optimize domain adaptation strategies in legal AI.
Towards End-to-End Network Intent Management with Large Language Models
Dinh, Lam, Cherrared, Sihem, Huang, Xiaofeng, Guillemin, Fabrice
Large Language Models (LLMs) are likely to play a key role in Intent-Based Networking (IBN) as they show remarkable performance in interpreting human language as well as code generation, enabling the translation of high-level intents expressed by humans into low-level network configurations. In this paper, we leverage closed-source language models (i.e., Google Gemini 1.5 pro, ChatGPT-4) and open-source models (i.e., LLama, Mistral) to investigate their capacity to generate E2E network configurations for radio access networks (RANs) and core networks in 5G/6G mobile networks. We introduce a novel performance metrics, known as FEACI, to quantitatively assess the format (F), explainability (E), accuracy (A), cost (C), and inference time (I) of the generated answer; existing general metrics are unable to capture these features. The results of our study demonstrate that open-source models can achieve comparable or even superior translation performance compared with the closed-source models requiring costly hardware setup and not accessible to all users.
RAG Without the Lag: Interactive Debugging for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipelines
Lauro, Quentin Romero, Shankar, Shreya, Zeighami, Sepanta, Parameswaran, Aditya
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines have become the de-facto approach for building AI assistants with access to external, domain-specific knowledge. Given a user query, RAG pipelines typically first retrieve (R) relevant information from external sources, before invoking a Large Language Model (LLM), augmented (A) with this information, to generate (G) responses. Modern RAG pipelines frequently chain multiple retrieval and generation components, in any order. However, developing effective RAG pipelines is challenging because retrieval and generation components are intertwined, making it hard to identify which component(s) cause errors in the eventual output. The parameters with the greatest impact on output quality often require hours of pre-processing after each change, creating prohibitively slow feedback cycles. To address these challenges, we present RAGGY, a developer tool that combines a Python library of composable RAG primitives with an interactive interface for real-time debugging. We contribute the design and implementation of RAGGY, insights into expert debugging patterns through a qualitative study with 12 engineers, and design implications for future RAG tools that better align with developers' natural workflows.
DETAM: Defending LLMs Against Jailbreak Attacks via Targeted Attention Modification
Li, Yu, Jiang, Han, Wei, Zhihua
With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), jailbreak attacks have become an increasingly pressing safety concern. While safety-aligned LLMs can effectively defend against normal harmful queries, they remain vulnerable to such attacks. Existing defense methods primarily rely on fine-tuning or input modification, which often suffer from limited generalization and reduced utility. To address this, we introduce DETAM, a finetuning-free defense approach that improves the defensive capabilities against jailbreak attacks of LLMs via targeted attention modification. Specifically, we analyze the differences in attention scores between successful and unsuccessful defenses to identify the attention heads sensitive to jailbreak attacks. During inference, we reallocate attention to emphasize the user's core intention, minimizing interference from attack tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate that DETAM outperforms various baselines in jailbreak defense and exhibits robust generalization across different attacks and models, maintaining its effectiveness even on in-the-wild jailbreak data. Furthermore, in evaluating the model's utility, we incorporated over-defense datasets, which further validate the superior performance of our approach. The code will be released immediately upon acceptance.
Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Segmentation with Image-Aware Prompt Generation
Park, SoYoung, Lee, Hyewon, Choi, Mingyu, Han, Seunghoon, Lee, Jong-Ryul, Lim, Sungsu, Kim, Tae-Ho
Anomaly segmentation is essential for industrial quality, maintenance, and stability. Existing text-guided zero-shot anomaly segmentation models are effective but rely on fixed prompts, limiting adaptability in diverse industrial scenarios. This highlights the need for flexible, context-aware prompting strategies. We propose Image-Aware Prompt Anomaly Segmentation (IAP-AS), which enhances anomaly segmentation by generating dynamic, context-aware prompts using an image tagging model and a large language model (LLM). IAP-AS extracts object attributes from images to generate context-aware prompts, improving adaptability and generalization in dynamic and unstructured industrial environments. In our experiments, IAP-AS improves the F1-max metric by up to 10%, demonstrating superior adaptability and generalization.
Q-FAKER: Query-free Hard Black-box Attack via Controlled Generation
Na, CheolWon, Choi, YunSeok, Lee, Jee-Hyong
Many adversarial attack approaches are proposed to verify the vulnerability of language models. However, they require numerous queries and the information on the target model. Even black-box attack methods also require the target model's output information. They are not applicable in real-world scenarios, as in hard black-box settings where the target model is closed and inaccessible. Even the recently proposed hard black-box attacks still require many queries and demand extremely high costs for training adversarial generators. To address these challenges, we propose Q-faker (Query-free Hard Black-box Attacker), a novel and efficient method that generates adversarial examples without accessing the target model. To avoid accessing the target model, we use a surrogate model instead. The surrogate model generates adversarial sentences for a target-agnostic attack. During this process, we leverage controlled generation techniques. We evaluate our proposed method on eight datasets. Experimental results demonstrate our method's effectiveness including high transferability and the high quality of the generated adversarial examples, and prove its practical in hard black-box settings.
Large Language Models for Validating Network Protocol Parsers
Zheng, Mingwei, Xie, Danning, Zhang, Xiangyu
Network protocol parsers are essential for enabling correct and secure communication between devices. Bugs in these parsers can introduce critical vulnerabilities, including memory corruption, information leakage, and denial-of-service attacks. An intuitive way to assess parser correctness is to compare the implementation with its official protocol standard. However, this comparison is challenging because protocol standards are typically written in natural language, whereas implementations are in source code. Existing methods like model checking, fuzzing, and differential testing have been used to find parsing bugs, but they either require significant manual effort or ignore the protocol standards, limiting their ability to detect semantic violations. To enable more automated validation of parser implementations against protocol standards, we propose PARVAL, a multi-agent framework built on large language models (LLMs). PARVAL leverages the capabilities of LLMs to understand both natural language and code. It transforms both protocol standards and their implementations into a unified intermediate representation, referred to as format specifications, and performs a differential comparison to uncover inconsistencies. We evaluate PARVAL on the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol. Our experiments demonstrate that PARVAL successfully identifies inconsistencies between the implementation and its RFC standard, achieving a low false positive rate of 5.6%. PARVAL uncovers seven unique bugs, including five previously unknown issues.
Prejudge-Before-Think: Enhancing Large Language Models at Test-Time by Process Prejudge Reasoning
Wang, Jianing, Jiang, Jin, Liu, Yang, Zhang, Mengdi, Cai, Xunliang
In this paper, we introduce a new \emph{process prejudge} strategy in LLM reasoning to demonstrate that bootstrapping with process prejudge allows the LLM to adaptively anticipate the errors encountered when advancing the subsequent reasoning steps, similar to people sometimes pausing to think about what mistakes may occur and how to avoid them, rather than relying solely on trial and error. Specifically, we define a prejudge node in the rationale, which represents a reasoning step, with at least one step that follows the prejudge node that has no paths toward the correct answer. To synthesize the prejudge reasoning process, we present an automated reasoning framework with a dynamic tree-searching strategy. This framework requires only one LLM to perform answer judging, response critiquing, prejudge generation, and thought completion. Furthermore, we develop a two-phase training mechanism with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to further enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Experimental results from competition-level complex reasoning demonstrate that our method can teach the model to prejudge before thinking and significantly enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs. Code and data is released at https://github.com/wjn1996/Prejudge-Before-Think.