We introduce SymbolicAI, a versatile and modular framework employing a logic-based approach to concept learning and flow management in generative processes. SymbolicAI enables the seamless integration of generative models with a diverse range of solvers by treating large language models (LLMs) as semantic parsers that execute tasks based on both natural and formal language instructions, thus bridging the gap between symbolic reasoning and generative AI. We leverage probabilistic programming principles to tackle complex tasks, and utilize differentiable and classical programming paradigms with their respective strengths. The framework introduces a set of polymorphic, compositional, and self-referential operations for data stream manipulation, aligning LLM outputs with user objectives. As a result, we can transition between the capabilities of various foundation models endowed with zero- and few-shot learning capabilities and specialized, fine-tuned models or solvers proficient in addressing specific problems. In turn, the framework facilitates the creation and evaluation of explainable computational graphs. We conclude by introducing a quality measure and its empirical score for evaluating these computational graphs, and propose a benchmark that compares various state-of-the-art LLMs across a set of complex workflows. We refer to the empirical score as the "Vector Embedding for Relational Trajectory Evaluation through Cross-similarity", or VERTEX score for short. The framework codebase and benchmark are linked below.

Purpose: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and LLaMA are increasingly recognized for their potential in the field of cheminformatics, particularly in interpreting Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System (SMILES), a standard method for representing chemical structures. These LLMs can decode SMILES strings into vector representations, providing a novel approach to understanding chemical graphs. Methods: We investigate the performance of ChatGPT and LLaMA in embedding SMILES strings. Our evaluation focuses on two key applications: molecular property (MP) prediction and drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction, both essential in drug development and healthcare. Results: We find that SMILES embeddings generated using LLaMA outperform those from ChatGPT in both MP and DDI prediction tasks. Notably, LLaMA-based SMILES embeddings show results comparable to existing methods in both prediction tasks. Conclusion: The application of LLMs in cheminformatics, particularly in utilizing SMILES embeddings, shows significant promise for advancing drug development. This includes improving the prediction of chemical properties and facilitating the drug discovery process. GitHub: https://github.com/sshaghayeghs/LLaMA-VS-ChatGPT

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks - resulting in harmful, unethical, or biased text generations. However, existing jailbreaking methods are computationally costly. In this paper, we propose the weak-to-strong jailbreaking attack, an efficient method to attack aligned LLMs to produce harmful text. Our key intuition is based on the observation that jailbroken and aligned models only differ in their initial decoding distributions. The weak-to-strong attack's key technical insight is using two smaller models (a safe and an unsafe one) to adversarially modify a significantly larger safe model's decoding probabilities. We evaluate the weak-to-strong attack on 5 diverse LLMs from 3 organizations. The results show our method can increase the misalignment rate to over 99% on two datasets with just one forward pass per example. Our study exposes an urgent safety issue that needs to be addressed when aligning LLMs. As an initial attempt, we propose a defense strategy to protect against such attacks, but creating more advanced defenses remains challenging. The code for replicating the method is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/weak-to-strong

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable advancements in their ability to generate fitting responses to natural language instructions. However, many current works rely on manual evaluation to judge the quality of generated responses. Since such manual evaluation is time-consuming, it does not easily scale to the evaluation of multiple models and model variants. In this short paper, we propose a straightforward but remarkably effective evaluation metric called SemScore, in which we directly compare model outputs to gold target responses using semantic textual similarity (STS). We conduct a comparative evaluation of the model outputs of 12 prominent instruction-tuned LLMs using 8 widely-used evaluation metrics for text generation. We find that our proposed SemScore metric outperforms all other, in many cases more complex, evaluation metrics in terms of correlation to human evaluation. These findings indicate the utility of our proposed metric for the evaluation of instruction-tuned LLMs.

Language model alignment has become an important component of AI safety, allowing safe interactions between humans and language models, by enhancing desired behaviors and inhibiting undesired ones. It is often done by tuning the model or inserting preset aligning prompts. Recently, representation engineering, a method which alters the model's behavior via changing its representations post-training, was shown to be effective in aligning LLMs (Zou et al., 2023a). Representation engineering yields gains in alignment oriented tasks such as resistance to adversarial attacks and reduction of social biases, but was also shown to cause a decrease in the ability of the model to perform basic tasks. In this paper we study the tradeoff between the increase in alignment and decrease in helpfulness of the model. We propose a theoretical framework which provides bounds for these two quantities, and demonstrate their relevance empirically. Interestingly, we find that while the helpfulness generally decreases, it does so quadratically with the norm of the representation engineering vector, while the alignment increases linearly with it, indicating a regime in which it is efficient to use representation engineering. We validate our findings empirically, and chart the boundaries to the usefulness of representation engineering for alignment.

Background: The semantics of entities extracted from a clinical text can be dramatically altered by modifiers, including entity negation, uncertainty, conditionality, severity, and subject. Existing models for determining modifiers of clinical entities involve regular expression or features weights that are trained independently for each modifier. Methods: We develop and evaluate a multi-task transformer architecture design where modifiers are learned and predicted jointly using the publicly available SemEval 2015 Task 14 corpus and a new Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) data set that contains modifiers shared with SemEval as well as novel modifiers specific for OUD. We evaluate the effectiveness of our multi-task learning approach versus previously published systems and assess the feasibility of transfer learning for clinical entity modifiers when only a portion of clinical modifiers are shared. Results: Our approach achieved state-of-the-art results on the ShARe corpus from SemEval 2015 Task 14, showing an increase of 1.1% on weighted accuracy, 1.7% on unweighted accuracy, and 10% on micro F1 scores. Conclusions: We show that learned weights from our shared model can be effectively transferred to a new partially matched data set, validating the use of transfer learning for clinical text modifiers

The dynamic nature of language, particularly evident in the realm of slang and memes on the Internet, poses serious challenges to the adaptability of large language models (LLMs). Traditionally anchored to static datasets, these models often struggle to keep up with the rapid linguistic evolution characteristic of online communities. This research aims to bridge this gap by enhancing LLMs' comprehension of the evolving new concepts on the Internet, without the high cost of continual retraining. In pursuit of this goal, we propose a new benchmark $\textbf{SLANG}$, which can autonomously integrates novel data to stay dataset up-to-date, to assess LLMs' capability in comprehending emerging concepts and an approach $\textbf{FOCUS}$, which uses causal inference to enhance LLMs to understand new phrases and their colloquial context. Our benchmark and approach involves digesting real-world instances of linguistic shifts, serving as contextual beacons, to form more precise and contextually relevant connections between newly emerging expressions and their meanings. The empirical analysis shows that our causal inference-based approach outperforms the traditional models in terms of precision and relevance in the comprehension of Internet slang and memes.

Artificial Intelligence is a field that lives many lives, and the term has come to encompass a motley collection of scientific and commercial endeavours. In this paper, I articulate the contours of a rather neglected but central scientific role that AI has to play, which I dub `AI-as-exploration'.The basic thrust of AI-as-exploration is that of creating and studying systems that can reveal candidate building blocks of intelligence that may differ from the forms of human and animal intelligence we are familiar with. In other words, I suggest that AI is one of the best tools we have for exploring intelligence space, namely the space of possible intelligent systems. I illustrate the value of AI-as-exploration by focusing on a specific case study, i.e., recent work on the capacity to combine novel and invented concepts in humans and Large Language Models. I show that the latter, despite showing human-level accuracy in such a task, most probably solve it in ways radically different, but no less relevant to intelligence research, to those hypothesised for humans.

Recent works have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. However, creating such datasets is difficult and most works rely on manual curation or proprietary language models. Automatic data curation is difficult as it is still not clear how we can define diversity for instruction tuning, how diversity and quality depend on one other, and how we can optimize dataset quality and diversity. To resolve these issue, we propose a new algorithm, Quality-Diversity Instruction Tuning (QDIT). QDIT provides a simple method to simultaneously control dataset diversity and quality, allowing us to conduct an in-depth study on the effect of diversity and quality on instruction tuning performance. From this study we draw two key insights (1) there is a natural tradeoff between data diversity and quality and (2) increasing data diversity significantly improves the worst case instruction following performance, therefore improving robustness. We validate the performance of QDIT on several large scale instruction tuning datasets, where we find it can substantially improve worst and average case performance compared to quality-driven data selection.

Transformers trained on huge text corpora exhibit a remarkable set of capabilities, e.g., performing basic arithmetic. Given the inherent compositional nature of language, one can expect the model to learn to compose these capabilities, potentially yielding a combinatorial explosion of what operations it can perform on an input. Motivated by the above, we train autoregressive Transformer models on a synthetic data-generating process that involves compositions of a set of well-defined monolithic capabilities. Through a series of extensive and systematic experiments on this data-generating process, we show that: (1) autoregressive Transformers can learn compositional structures from small amounts of training data and generalize to exponentially or even combinatorially many functions; (2) generating intermediate outputs when composing functions is more effective for generalizing to new, unseen compositions than not generating any intermediate outputs (3) biases in the order of the compositions in the training data result in Transformers that fail to compose some combinations of functions; and (4) the attention layers select which capability to apply while the feed-forward layers execute the selected capability.