Large Language Model
When Machine Unlearning Meets Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Keep Secret or Forget Knowledge?
Wang, Shang, Zhu, Tianqing, Ye, Dayong, Zhou, Wanlei
The deployment of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini has shown their powerful natural language generation capabilities. However, these models can inadvertently learn and retain sensitive information and harmful content during training, raising significant ethical and legal concerns. To address these issues, machine unlearning has been introduced as a potential solution. While existing unlearning methods take into account the specific characteristics of LLMs, they often suffer from high computational demands, limited applicability, or the risk of catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose a lightweight unlearning framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology. By modifying the external knowledge base of RAG, we simulate the effects of forgetting without directly interacting with the unlearned LLM. We approach the construction of unlearned knowledge as a constrained optimization problem, deriving two key components that underpin the effectiveness of RAG-based unlearning. This RAG-based approach is particularly effective for closed-source LLMs, where existing unlearning methods often fail. We evaluate our framework through extensive experiments on both open-source and closed-source models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama-2-7b-chat-hf, and PaLM 2. The results demonstrate that our approach meets five key unlearning criteria: effectiveness, universality, harmlessness, simplicity, and robustness. Meanwhile, this approach can extend to multimodal large language models and LLM-based agents.
Toward Robust RALMs: Revealing the Impact of Imperfect Retrieval on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
Retrieval Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have gained significant attention for their ability to generate accurate answer and improve efficiency. However, RALMs are inherently vulnerable to imperfect information due to their reliance on the imperfect retriever or knowledge source. We identify three common scenarios-unanswerable, adversarial, conflicting-where retrieved document sets can confuse RALM with plausible real-world examples. We present the first comprehensive investigation to assess how well RALMs detect and handle such problematic scenarios. Among these scenarios, to systematically examine adversarial robustness we propose a new adversarial attack method, Generative model-based ADVersarial attack (GenADV) and a novel metric Robustness under Additional Document (RAD). Our findings reveal that RALMs often fail to identify the unanswerability or contradiction of a document set, which frequently leads to hallucinations. Moreover, we show the addition of an adversary significantly degrades RALM's performance, with the model becoming even more vulnerable when the two scenarios overlap (adversarial+unanswerable). Our research identifies critical areas for assessing and enhancing the robustness of RALMs, laying the foundation for the development of more robust models.
CAP: Data Contamination Detection via Consistency Amplification
Zhao, Yi, Li, Jing, Yang, Linyi
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used, but concerns about data contamination challenge the reliability of LLM evaluations. Existing contamination detection methods are often task-specific or require extra prerequisites, limiting practicality. We propose a novel framework, Consistency Amplification-based Data Contamination Detection (CAP), which introduces the Performance Consistency Ratio (PCR) to measure dataset leakage by leveraging LM consistency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to explicitly differentiate between fine-tuning and contamination, which is crucial for detecting contamination in domain-specific models. Additionally, CAP is applicable to various benchmarks and works for both white-box and black-box models. We validate CAP's effectiveness through experiments on seven LLMs and four domain-specific benchmarks. Our findings also show that composite benchmarks from various dataset sources are particularly prone to unintentional contamination. Codes will be publicly available soon.
AutoFPDesigner: Automated Flight Procedure Design Based on Multi-Agent Large Language Model
Zhu, Longtao, Yang, Hongyu, Song, Ge, Ma, Xin, Zhang, Yanxin, Ji, Yulong
Current flight procedure design methods heavily rely on human-led design process, which is not only low auto-mation but also suffer from complex algorithm modelling and poor generalization. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an agent-driven flight procedure design method based on large language model, named Au-toFPDesigner, which utilizes multi-agent collaboration to complete procedure design. The method enables end-to-end automated design of performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures. In this process, the user input the design requirements in natural language, AutoFPDesigner models the flight procedure design by loading the design speci-fications and utilizing tool libraries complete the design. AutoFPDesigner allows users to oversee and seamlessly participate in the design process. Experimental results show that AutoFPDesigner ensures nearly 100% safety in the designed flight procedures and achieves 75% task completion rate, with good adaptability across different design tasks. AutoFPDesigner introduces a new paradigm for flight procedure design and represents a key step towards the automation of this process. Keywords: Flight Procedure Design; Large Language Model; Performance-Based Navigation (PBN); Multi Agent;
In-context KV-Cache Eviction for LLMs via Attention-Gate
Zeng, Zihao, Lin, Bokai, Hou, Tianqi, Zhang, Hao, Deng, Zhijie
The KV-Cache technique has become the standard for the inference of large language models (LLMs). It caches states of self-attention to avoid recomputation. Yet, it is widely criticized that KV-Cache can become a bottleneck of the LLM inference system, especially when confronted with ultra-large models and long-context queries. A natural remedy is to discard the KV-Cache for less important tokens, with StreamingLLM as an example, but the used static eviction strategies cannot flexibly adapt to varying contexts. Remedies like H2O leverage accumulative attention scores to perform dynamic eviction but suffer from the attention bias issue in capturing contextual information. This paper bridges this gap by devising a parameterized KV-Cache eviction mechanism, dubbed as Attention-Gate, which accepts the whole context as input and yields eviction flags for each token to realize in-context eviction. The subsequent self-attention module proceeds according to the flags and only the KV states for the remaining tokens need to be cached. The Attention-Gates can vary among different heads and layers and be trivially plugged into pre-trained LLMs, tuned by cost-effective continual pre-training or supervised fine-tuning objectives to acquire what to discard. The computational and memory overhead introduced by Attention-Gates is minimal. Our method is validated across multiple tasks, demonstrating both efficiency and adaptability. After a highly efficient continual pre-training, it achieves higher average accuracy and evicts more tokens compared to traditional training-free methods. In supervised fine-tuning, it not only evicts many tokens but also outperforms LoRA-finetuned LLMs on some datasets, such as RTE, where it improves accuracy by 13.9% while evicting 62.8% of tokens, showing that effective eviction of redundant tokens can even enhance performance.
A Prompt Engineering Approach and a Knowledge Graph based Framework for Tackling Legal Implications of Large Language Model Answers
Hannah, George, Sousa, Rita T., Dasoulas, Ioannis, d'Amato, Claudia
With the recent surge in popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is the rising risk of users blindly trusting the information in the response, even in cases where the LLM recommends actions that have potential legal implications and this may put the user in danger. We provide an empirical analysis on multiple existing LLMs showing the urgency of the problem. Hence, we propose a short-term solution consisting in an approach for isolating these legal issues through prompt re-engineering. We further analyse the outcomes but also the limitations of the prompt engineering based approach and we highlight the need of additional resources for fully solving the problem We also propose a framework powered by a legal knowledge graph (KG) to generate legal citations for these legal issues, enriching the response of the LLM.
Back to School: Translation Using Grammar Books
Hus, Jonathan, Anastasopoulos, Antonios
Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages are not considered high resource and lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not without resources, however, and bilingual dictionaries and grammar books are available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can begin to use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world's languages. In this paper, we demonstrate incorporating grammar books in the prompt of GPT-4 to improve machine translation and evaluate the performance on 16 topologically diverse low-resource languages, using a combination of reference material to show that the machine translation performance of LLMs can be improved using this method.
Jailbreaking and Mitigation of Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models
Peng, Benji, Bi, Ziqian, Niu, Qian, Liu, Ming, Feng, Pohsun, Wang, Tianyang, Yan, Lawrence K. Q., Wen, Yizhu, Zhang, Yichao, Yin, Caitlyn Heqi
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by advancing natural language understanding and generation, enabling applications across fields beyond healthcare, software engineering, and conversational systems. Despite these advancements in the past few years, LLMs have shown considerable vulnerabilities, particularly to prompt injection and jailbreaking attacks. This review analyzes the state of research on these vulnerabilities and presents available defense strategies. We roughly categorize attack approaches into prompt-based, model-based, multimodal, and multilingual, covering techniques such as adversarial prompting, backdoor injections, and cross-modality exploits. We also review various defense mechanisms, including prompt filtering, transformation, alignment techniques, multi-agent defenses, and self-regulation, evaluating their strengths and shortcomings. We also discuss key metrics and benchmarks used to assess LLM safety and robustness, noting challenges like the quantification of attack success in interactive contexts and biases in existing datasets. Identifying current research gaps, we suggest future directions for resilient alignment strategies, advanced defenses against evolving attacks, automation of jailbreak detection, and consideration of ethical and societal impacts. This review emphasizes the need for continued research and cooperation within the AI community to enhance LLM security and ensure their safe deployment.
DM-Codec: Distilling Multimodal Representations for Speech Tokenization
Ahasan, Md Mubtasim, Fahim, Md, Mohiuddin, Tasnim, Rahman, A K M Mahbubur, Chadha, Aman, Iqbal, Tariq, Amin, M Ashraful, Islam, Md Mofijul, Ali, Amin Ahsan
Recent advancements in speech-language models have yielded significant improvements in speech tokenization and synthesis. However, effectively mapping the complex, multidimensional attributes of speech into discrete tokens remains challenging. Existing speech representations generally fall into two categories: acoustic tokens from audio codecs and semantic tokens from speech self-supervised learning models. Although recent efforts have unified acoustic and semantic tokens for improved performance, they overlook the crucial role of contextual representation in comprehensive speech modeling. Our empirical investigations reveal that the absence of contextual representations results in elevated Word Error Rate (WER) and Word Information Lost (WIL) scores in speech transcriptions. To address these limitations, we propose two novel distillation approaches: (1) a language model (LM)-guided distillation method that incorporates contextual information, and (2) a combined LM and self-supervised speech model (SM)-guided distillation technique that effectively distills multimodal representations (acoustic, semantic, and contextual) into a comprehensive speech tokenizer, termed DM-Codec. The DM-Codec architecture adopts a streamlined encoder-decoder framework with a Residual Vector Quantizer (RVQ) and incorporates the LM and SM during the training process. Experiments show DM-Codec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenization models, reducing WER by up to 13.46%, WIL by 9.82%, and improving speech quality by 5.84% and intelligibility by 1.85% on the LibriSpeech benchmark dataset. In recent years, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized various domains, offering unprecedented advancements across a wide array of tasks (OpenAI, 2024). A critical component of this success has been the tokenization of input data, enabling vast amounts of information processing (Du et al., 2024; Rust et al., 2021).
A Dual-Fusion Cognitive Diagnosis Framework for Open Student Learning Environments
Liu, Yuanhao, Liu, Shuo, Liu, Yimeng, Yang, Jingwen, Qian, Hong
Cognitive diagnosis model (CDM) is a fundamental and upstream component in intelligent education. It aims to infer students' mastery levels based on historical response logs. However, existing CDMs usually follow the ID-based embedding paradigm, which could often diminish the effectiveness of CDMs in open student learning environments. This is mainly because they can hardly directly infer new students' mastery levels or utilize new exercises or knowledge without retraining. Textual semantic information, due to its unified feature space and easy accessibility, can help alleviate this issue. Unfortunately, directly incorporating semantic information may not benefit CDMs, since it does not capture response-relevant features and thus discards the individual characteristics of each student. To this end, this paper proposes a dual-fusion cognitive diagnosis framework (DFCD) to address the challenge of aligning two different modalities, i.e., textual semantic features and response-relevant features. Specifically, in DFCD, we first propose the exercise-refiner and concept-refiner to make the exercises and knowledge concepts more coherent and reasonable via large language models. Then, DFCD encodes the refined features using text embedding models to obtain the semantic information. For response-related features, we propose a novel response matrix to fully incorporate the information within the response logs. Finally, DFCD designs a dual-fusion module to merge the two modal features. The ultimate representations possess the capability of inference in open student learning environments and can be also plugged in existing CDMs. Extensive experiments across real-world datasets show that DFCD achieves superior performance by integrating different modalities and strong adaptability in open student learning environments.