Large Language Model
Cross-Refine: Improving Natural Language Explanation Generation by Learning in Tandem
Wang, Qianli, Anikina, Tatiana, Feldhus, Nils, Ostermann, Simon, Möller, Sebastian, Schmitt, Vera
Natural language explanations (NLEs) are vital for elucidating the reasoning behind large language model (LLM) decisions. Many techniques have been developed to generate NLEs using LLMs. However, like humans, LLMs might not always produce optimal NLEs on first attempt. Inspired by human learning processes, we introduce Cross-Refine, which employs role modeling by deploying two LLMs as generator and critic, respectively. The generator outputs a first NLE and then refines this initial explanation using feedback and suggestions provided by the critic. Cross-Refine does not require any supervised training data or additional training. We validate Cross-Refine across three NLP tasks using three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs through automatic and human evaluation. We select Self-Refine (Madaan et al., 2023) as the baseline, which only utilizes self-feedback to refine the explanations. Our findings from automatic evaluation and a user study indicate that Cross-Refine outperforms Self-Refine. Meanwhile, Cross-Refine can perform effectively with less powerful LLMs, whereas Self-Refine only yields strong results with ChatGPT. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of feedback and suggestions. Both of them play an important role in refining explanations. We further evaluate Cross-Refine on a bilingual dataset in English and German.
Large Language Models are Pattern Matchers: Editing Semi-Structured and Structured Documents with ChatGPT
Large Language Models (LLMs) are extensive artificial neural networks trained on vast amounts of textual data to generate coherent continuations of given prompts. The initial training, which is time-consuming and computationally intensive, is typically followed by additional training phases. Fine-tuning with specific tasks and example responses enables LLMs to solve particular types of problems, while Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback focuses them on delivering high-quality and socially preferred responses. Research has shown that LLMs can not only produce correct natural and formal language texts conveying plausible contents, but are also capable of reasoning, planning, and simulating other forms of intelligent behaviors. Thus, LLMs offer a wide range of potential applications, the extent of which is still not fully explored. Frequently, LLMs are applied for creating and processing texts, for communicating, planning, and computer programming. LLMs require that all tasks and inputs are provided in a textual format. For many applications, LLMs are prompted with freely phrased, natural language text or program code. Yet, they are also capable of processing texts that are structured such that they represent data or formatted documents.
Understanding Knowledge Drift in LLMs through Misinformation
Fastowski, Alina, Kasneci, Gjergji
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous applications, making them an integral part of our digital ecosystem. However, their reliability becomes critical, especially when these models are exposed to misinformation. We primarily analyze the susceptibility of state-of-the-art LLMs to factual inaccuracies when they encounter false information in a QnA scenario, an issue that can lead to a phenomenon we refer to as *knowledge drift*, which significantly undermines the trustworthiness of these models. We evaluate the factuality and the uncertainty of the models' responses relying on Entropy, Perplexity, and Token Probability metrics. Our experiments reveal that an LLM's uncertainty can increase up to 56.6% when the question is answered incorrectly due to the exposure to false information. At the same time, repeated exposure to the same false information can decrease the models uncertainty again (-52.8% w.r.t. the answers on the untainted prompts), potentially manipulating the underlying model's beliefs and introducing a drift from its original knowledge. These findings provide insights into LLMs' robustness and vulnerability to adversarial inputs, paving the way for developing more reliable LLM applications across various domains. The code is available at https://github.com/afastowski/knowledge_drift.
Think Together and Work Better: Combining Humans' and LLMs' Think-Aloud Outcomes for Effective Text Evaluation
Chu, SeongYeub, Kim, JongWoo, Yi, MunYong
This study introduces \textbf{InteractEval}, a framework that integrates human expertise and Large Language Models (LLMs) using the Think-Aloud (TA) method to generate attributes for checklist-based text evaluation. By combining human flexibility and reasoning with LLM consistency, InteractEval outperforms traditional non-LLM-based and LLM-based baselines across four distinct dimensions, consisting of Coherence, Fluency, Consistency, and Relevance. The experiment also investigates the effectiveness of the TA method, showing that it promotes divergent thinking in both humans and LLMs, leading to the generation of a wider range of relevant attributes and enhance text evaluation performance. Comparative analysis reveals that humans excel at identifying attributes related to internal quality (Coherence and Fluency), but LLMs perform better at those attributes related to external alignment (Consistency and Relevance). Consequently, leveraging both humans and LLMs together produces the best evaluation outcomes. In other words, this study emphasizes the necessity of effectively combining humans and LLMs in an automated checklist-based text evaluation framework. The code is available at \textbf{\url{https://github.com/BBeeChu/InteractEval.git}}.
AdaCAD: Adaptively Decoding to Balance Conflicts between Contextual and Parametric Knowledge
Wang, Han, Prasad, Archiki, Stengel-Eskin, Elias, Bansal, Mohit
Knowledge conflict arises from discrepancies between information in the context of a large language model (LLM) and the knowledge stored in its parameters. This can hurt performance when using standard decoding techniques, which tend to ignore the context. Existing test-time contrastive methods seek to address this by comparing the LLM's output distribution with and without the context and adjust the model according to the contrast between them. However, we find that these methods frequently misjudge the degree of conflict and struggle to handle instances that vary in their amount of conflict, with static methods over-adjusting when conflict is absent. We propose a fine-grained, instance-level approach called AdaCAD, which dynamically infers the weight of adjustment based on the degree of conflict, as measured by the Jensen-Shannon divergence between distributions representing contextual and parametric knowledge. Our experiments across four models on six diverse question-answering (QA) datasets and three summarization tasks demonstrate that our training-free adaptive method consistently outperforms other decoding methods on QA, with average accuracy gains of 14.21% (absolute) over a static contrastive baseline, and improves the factuality of summaries by 5.59 (AlignScore). Furthermore, our analysis shows that while decoding with contrastive baselines hurts performance when conflict is absent, AdaCAD mitigates these losses, making it more applicable to real-world datasets in which some examples have conflict and others do not.
Traceable LLM-based validation of statements in knowledge graphs
This article presents a method for verifying RDF triples using LLMs, with an emphasis on providing traceable arguments. Because the LLMs cannot currently reliably identify the origin of the information used to construct the response to the user query, our approach is to avoid using internal LLM factual knowledge altogether. Instead, verified RDF statements are compared to chunks of external documents retrieved through a web search or Wikipedia. To assess the possible application of this workflow on biosciences content, we evaluated 1,719 positive statements from the BioRED dataset and the same number of newly generated negative statements. The resulting precision is 88%, and recall is 44%. This indicates that the method requires human oversight. We demonstrate the method on Wikidata, where a SPARQL query is used to automatically retrieve statements needing verification. Overall, the results suggest that LLMs could be used for large-scale verification of statements in KGs, a task previously unfeasible due to human annotation costs.
Securing Vision-Language Models with a Robust Encoder Against Jailbreak and Adversarial Attacks
Hossain, Md Zarif, Imteaj, Ahmed
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), trained on multimodal big datasets, have significantly advanced AI by excelling in vision-language tasks. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly jailbreak attacks, which bypass safety protocols and cause the model to generate misleading or harmful responses. This vulnerability stems from both the inherent susceptibilities of LLMs and the expanded attack surface introduced by the visual modality. We propose Sim-CLIP+, a novel defense mechanism that adversarially fine-tunes the CLIP vision encoder by leveraging a Siamese architecture. This approach maximizes cosine similarity between perturbed and clean samples, facilitating resilience against adversarial manipulations. Sim-CLIP+ offers a plug-and-play solution, allowing seamless integration into existing LVLM architectures as a robust vision encoder. Unlike previous defenses, our method requires no structural modifications to the LVLM and incurs minimal computational overhead. Sim-CLIP+ demonstrates effectiveness against both gradient-based adversarial attacks and various jailbreak techniques. We evaluate Sim-CLIP+ against three distinct jailbreak attack strategies and perform clean evaluations using standard downstream datasets, including COCO for image captioning and OKVQA for visual question answering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sim-CLIP+ maintains high clean accuracy while substantially improving robustness against both gradient-based adversarial attacks and jailbreak techniques. Our code and robust vision encoders are available at https://github.com/speedlab-git/Robust-Encoder-against-Jailbreak-attack.git.
Propaganda to Hate: A Multimodal Analysis of Arabic Memes with Multi-Agent LLMs
Alam, Firoj, Biswas, Md. Rafiul, Shah, Uzair, Zaghouani, Wajdi, Mikros, Georgios
In the past decade, social media platforms have been used for information dissemination and consumption. While a major portion of the content is posted to promote citizen journalism and public awareness, some content is posted to mislead users. Among different content types such as text, images, and videos, memes (text overlaid on images) are particularly prevalent and can serve as powerful vehicles for propaganda, hate, and humor. In the current literature, there have been efforts to individually detect such content in memes. However, the study of their intersection is very limited. In this study, we explore the intersection between propaganda and hate in memes using a multi-agent LLM-based approach. We extend the propagandistic meme dataset with coarse and fine-grained hate labels. Our finding suggests that there is an association between propaganda and hate in memes. We provide detailed experimental results that can serve as a baseline for future studies. We will make the experimental resources publicly available to the community.
Latent Space Interpretation for Stylistic Analysis and Explainable Authorship Attribution
Alshomary, Milad, Ri, Narutatsu, Apidianaki, Marianna, Patel, Ajay, Muresan, Smaranda, McKeown, Kathleen
Recent state-of-the-art authorship attribution methods learn authorship representations of texts in a latent, non-interpretable space, hindering their usability in real-world applications. Our work proposes a novel approach to interpreting these learned embeddings by identifying representative points in the latent space and utilizing LLMs to generate informative natural language descriptions of the writing style of each point. We evaluate the alignment of our interpretable space with the latent one and find that it achieves the best prediction agreement compared to other baselines. Additionally, we conduct a human evaluation to assess the quality of these style descriptions, validating their utility as explanations for the latent space. Finally, we investigate whether human performance on the challenging AA task improves when aided by our system's explanations, finding an average improvement of around +20% in accuracy.
CLNX: Bridging Code and Natural Language for C/C++ Vulnerability-Contributing Commits Identification
Qin, Zeqing, Wu, Yiwei, Han, Lansheng
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in vulnerability identification. As C/C++ comprises half of the Open-Source Software (OSS) vulnerabilities over the past decade and updates in OSS mainly occur through commits, enhancing LLMs' ability to identify C/C++ Vulnerability-Contributing Commits (VCCs) is essential. However, current studies primarily focus on further pre-training LLMs on massive code datasets, which is resource-intensive and poses efficiency challenges. In this paper, we enhance the ability of BERT-based LLMs to identify C/C++ VCCs in a lightweight manner. We propose CodeLinguaNexus (CLNX) as a bridge facilitating communication between C/C++ programs and LLMs. Based on commits, CLNX efficiently converts the source code into a more natural representation while preserving key details. Specifically, CLNX first applies structure-level naturalization to decompose complex programs, followed by token-level naturalization to interpret complex symbols. We evaluate CLNX on public datasets of 25,872 C/C++ functions with their commits. The results show that CLNX significantly enhances the performance of LLMs on identifying C/C++ VCCs. Moreover, CLNX-equipped CodeBERT achieves new state-of-the-art and identifies 38 OSS vulnerabilities in the real world.