Large language models have the potential to be valuable in the healthcare industry, but it's crucial to verify their safety and effectiveness through rigorous evaluation. For this purpose, we comprehensively evaluated both open-source LLMs and Google's new multimodal LLM called Gemini across Medical reasoning, hallucination detection, and Medical Visual Question Answering tasks. While Gemini showed competence, it lagged behind state-of-the-art models like MedPaLM 2 and GPT-4 in diagnostic accuracy. Additionally, Gemini achieved an accuracy of 61.45\% on the medical VQA dataset, significantly lower than GPT-4V's score of 88\%. Our analysis revealed that Gemini is highly susceptible to hallucinations, overconfidence, and knowledge gaps, which indicate risks if deployed uncritically. We also performed a detailed analysis by medical subject and test type, providing actionable feedback for developers and clinicians. To mitigate risks, we applied prompting strategies that improved performance. Additionally, we facilitated future research and development by releasing a Python module for medical LLM evaluation and establishing a dedicated leaderboard on Hugging Face for medical domain LLMs. Python module can be found at https://github.com/promptslab/RosettaEval

The integration of multimodal Electronic Health Records (EHR) data has significantly improved clinical predictive capabilities. Leveraging clinical notes and multivariate time-series EHR, existing models often lack the medical context relevent to clinical tasks, prompting the incorporation of external knowledge, particularly from the knowledge graph (KG). Previous approaches with KG knowledge have primarily focused on structured knowledge extraction, neglecting unstructured data modalities and semantic high dimensional medical knowledge. In response, we propose REALM, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) driven framework to enhance multimodal EHR representations that address these limitations. Firstly, we apply Large Language Model (LLM) to encode long context clinical notes and GRU model to encode time-series EHR data. Secondly, we prompt LLM to extract task-relevant medical entities and match entities in professionally labeled external knowledge graph (PrimeKG) with corresponding medical knowledge. By matching and aligning with clinical standards, our framework eliminates hallucinations and ensures consistency. Lastly, we propose an adaptive multimodal fusion network to integrate extracted knowledge with multimodal EHR data. Our extensive experiments on MIMIC-III mortality and readmission tasks showcase the superior performance of our REALM framework over baselines, emphasizing the effectiveness of each module. REALM framework contributes to refining the use of multimodal EHR data in healthcare and bridging the gap with nuanced medical context essential for informed clinical predictions.

The speech-to-song illusion is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby a spoken sentence sounds increasingly more musical as it is repeated. Despite decades of research, a complete formal account of this transformation is still lacking, and some of its nuanced characteristics, namely, that certain phrases appear to transform while others do not, is not well understood. Here we provide a formal account of this phenomenon, by recasting it as a statistical inference whereby a rational agent attempts to decide whether a sequence of utterances is more likely to have been produced in a song or speech. Using this approach and analyzing song and speech corpora, we further introduce a novel prose-to-lyrics illusion that is purely text-based. In this illusion, simply duplicating written sentences makes them appear more like song lyrics. We provide robust evidence for this new illusion in both human participants and large language models.

We introduce event-keyed summarization (EKS), a novel task that marries traditional summarization and document-level event extraction, with the goal of generating a contextualized summary for a specific event, given a document and an extracted event structure. We introduce a dataset for this task, MUCSUM, consisting of summaries of all events in the classic MUC-4 dataset, along with a set of baselines that comprises both pretrained LM standards in the summarization literature, as well as larger frontier models. We show that ablations that reduce EKS to traditional summarization or structure-to-text yield inferior summaries of target events and that MUCSUM is a robust benchmark for this task. Lastly, we conduct a human evaluation of both reference and model summaries, and provide some detailed analysis of the results.

Tuning pretrained language models for dialogue generation has been a prevalent paradigm for building capable dialogue agents. Yet, traditional tuning narrowly views dialogue generation as resembling other language generation tasks, ignoring the role disparities between two speakers and the multi-round interactive process that dialogues ought to be. Such a manner leads to unsatisfactory chat consistency of the built agent. In this work, we emphasize the interactive, communicative nature of dialogue and argue that it is more feasible to model the speaker roles of agent and user separately, enabling the agent to adhere to its role consistently. We propose an efficient Multi-round Interactive Dialogue Tuning (Midi-Tuning) framework. It models the agent and user individually with two adapters built upon large language models, where they utilize utterances round by round in alternating order and are tuned via a round-level memory caching mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, our framework performs superior to traditional fine-tuning and harbors the tremendous potential for improving dialogue consistency.

The study of energetics necessarily involves numerous scientific domains, spanning shock physics and detonation science, fluid dynamics, material science, thermodynamics, and chemical synthesis. The plethora of sub-disciplines of math, physics, chemistry, and engineering pose a challenge to practitioners who would wish to amass an expertise of energetics. Furthermore, maintaining awareness of advancements in energetics research is complicated by the exponential rate at which new research is published across scientific disciplines, including energetics. Thus, the development of automated and intelligent approaches for extracting knowledge from papers, reports, textbooks, and patents related to energetics could aid researchers and accelerate progress in energetics science. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a sub-field of linguistics, computer science, and Machine Learning (ML) involving the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. NLP techniques are used to analyze and generate human language, allowing computers to read, interpret, and understand text and speech. In the context of energetics research, NLP can be used to analyze large volumes of textual data, such as scientific papers, technical reports, and patents, in order to extract relevant information about the concepts that underlie and explain energetics phenomenon. Furthermore, NLP can enable natural language understanding that could be further applied to text mining journal articles and performing numerous natural language tasks such as classification, summarization, and recommendation. Overall, the use of NLP in energetics research has the potential to enhance our understanding of energetic materials and phenomenon, and assist in the development novel propellants, explosives, and pyrotechnics.

Trained on massive publicly available data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated tremendous success across various fields. While more data contributes to better performance, a disconcerting reality is that high-quality public data will be exhausted in a few years. In this paper, we offer a potential next step for contemporary LLMs: collaborative and privacy-preserving LLM training on the underutilized distributed private data via federated learning (FL), where multiple data owners collaboratively train a shared model without transmitting raw data. To achieve this, we build a concise, integrated, and research-friendly framework/codebase, named OpenFedLLM. It covers federated instruction tuning for enhancing instruction-following capability, federated value alignment for aligning with human values, and 7 representative FL algorithms. Besides, OpenFedLLM supports training on diverse domains, where we cover 8 training datasets; and provides comprehensive evaluations, where we cover 30+ evaluation metrics. Through extensive experiments, we observe that all FL algorithms outperform local training on training LLMs, demonstrating a clear performance improvement across a variety of settings. Notably, in a financial benchmark, Llama2-7B fine-tuned by applying any FL algorithm can outperform GPT-4 by a significant margin while the model obtained through individual training cannot, demonstrating strong motivation for clients to participate in FL.

Decoding methods play an indispensable role in converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. Prior research on decoding methods, primarily focusing on task-specific models, may not extend to the current era of general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the recent influx of decoding strategies has further complicated this landscape. This paper provides a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of various decoding methods within the context of LLMs, evaluating their performance, robustness to hyperparameter changes, and decoding speeds across a wide range of tasks, models, and deployment environments. Our findings reveal that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent and influenced by factors such as alignment, model size, and quantization. Intriguingly, sensitivity analysis exposes that certain methods achieve superior performance at the cost of extensive hyperparameter tuning, highlighting the trade-off between attaining optimal results and the practicality of implementation in varying contexts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated with external tools. While these integrations can significantly improve the functionality of LLMs, they also create a new attack surface where confidential data may be disclosed between different components. Specifically, malicious tools can exploit vulnerabilities in the LLM itself to manipulate the model and compromise the data of other services, raising the question of how private data can be protected in the context of LLM integrations. In this work, we provide a systematic way of evaluating confidentiality in LLM-integrated systems. For this, we formalize a "secret key" game that can capture the ability of a model to conceal private information. This enables us to compare the vulnerability of a model against confidentiality attacks and also the effectiveness of different defense strategies. In this framework, we evaluate eight previously published attacks and four defenses. We find that current defenses lack generalization across attack strategies. Building on this analysis, we propose a method for robustness fine-tuning, inspired by adversarial training. This approach is effective in lowering the success rate of attackers and in improving the system's resilience against unknown attacks.

To improve the ability of the large language model (LLMs) to handle complex reasoning problems, chain-of-thoughts (CoT) methods were proposed to guide LLMs to reason step-by-step, facilitating problem solving from simple to complex tasks. State-of-the-art approaches for generating such a chain involve interactive collaboration, where the learner generates candidate intermediate thoughts, evaluated by the LLM, guiding the generation of subsequent thoughts. However, a widespread yet understudied problem is that the evaluation from the LLM is typically noisy and unreliable, potentially misleading the generation process in selecting promising intermediate thoughts. In this paper, motivated by Vapnik's principle, we propose a novel comparison-based CoT generation algorithm that directly identifies the most promising thoughts with the noisy feedback from the LLM. In each round, we randomly pair intermediate thoughts and directly prompt the LLM to select the more promising one from each pair, allowing us to identify the most promising thoughts through an iterative process. To further model the noise in the comparison, we resort to the techniques of ensemble and dueling bandits and propose two variants of the proposed algorithm. Experiments on three real-world mathematical and reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and verify the rationale of the direct pairwise comparison.