Language models, given their black-box nature, often exhibit sensitivity to input perturbations, leading to trust issues due to hallucinations. To bolster trust, it's essential to understand these models' failure modes and devise strategies to enhance their performance. In this study, we propose a framework to study the effect of input perturbations on language models of different scales, from pre-trained models to large language models (LLMs). We use fine-tuning to train a robust model to perturbations, and we investigate whether exposure to one perturbation improves or degrades the model's performance on other perturbations. To address multi-perturbation robustness, we suggest three distinct training strategies. We also extend the framework to LLMs via a chain of thought(COT) prompting with exemplars. We instantiate our framework for the Tabular-NLI task and show that the proposed strategies train the model robust to different perturbations without losing accuracy on a given dataset.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently made impressive strides in natural language understanding tasks. Despite their remarkable performance, understanding their decision-making process remains a big challenge. In this paper, we look into bringing some transparency to this process by introducing a new explanation dataset for question answering (QA) tasks that integrates knowledge graphs (KGs) in a novel way. Our dataset includes 12,102 question-answer-explanation (QAE) triples. Each explanation in the dataset links the LLM's reasoning to entities and relations in the KGs. The explanation component includes a why-choose explanation, a why-not-choose explanation, and a set of reason-elements that underlie the LLM's decision. We leverage KGs and graph attention networks (GAT) to find the reason-elements and transform them into why-choose and why-not-choose explanations that are comprehensible to humans. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the potential of our dataset to improve the in-context learning of LLMs, and enhance their interpretability and explainability. Our work contributes to the field of explainable AI by enabling a deeper understanding of the LLMs decision-making process to make them more transparent and thereby, potentially more reliable, to researchers and practitioners alike. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/chen-zichen/XplainLLM_dataset.git

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that achieve success in applications are susceptible to adversarial attack methods that are capable of generating adversarial examples with minor perturbations. Although recent attack methods can achieve a relatively high attack success rate (ASR), our observation shows that the generated adversarial examples have a different data distribution compared with the original examples. Specifically, these adversarial examples exhibit lower confidence levels and higher distance to the training data distribution. As a result, they are easy to detect using very simple detection methods, diminishing the actual effectiveness of these attack methods. To solve this problem, we propose a Distribution-Aware LoRA-based Adversarial Attack (DALA) method, which considers the distribution shift of adversarial examples to improve attack effectiveness under detection methods. We further design a new evaluation metric NASR combining ASR and detection for the attack task. We conduct experiments on four widely-used datasets and validate the attack effectiveness on ASR and NASR of the adversarial examples generated by DALA on the BERT-base model and the black-box LLaMA2-7b model.

The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically allows models to refine and improve their answers, yet systematic analysis of the multi-turn behavior of LLMs remains limited. In this paper, we propose the FlipFlop experiment: in the first round of the conversation, an LLM responds to a prompt containing a classification task. In a second round, the LLM is challenged with a follow-up phrase like "Are you sure?", offering an opportunity for the model to reflect on its initial answer, and decide whether to confirm or flip its answer. A systematic study of nine LLMs on seven classification tasks reveals that models flip their answers on average 46% of the time and that all models see a deterioration of accuracy between their first and final prediction, with an average drop of 17%. The FlipFlop experiment illustrates the universality of sycophantic behavior in LLMs and provides a robust framework to analyze model behavior and evaluate potential solutions.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various downstream NLP tasks. Nevertheless, the resource requirements of pre-training large language models in terms of memory and training compute pose significant challenges. Furthermore, due to the substantial resources required, many PLM weights are confidential. Consequently, users are compelled to share their data with model owners for fine-tuning on specific tasks. To overcome the limitations, we introduce Plug-in External Memory Adaptation (PEMA), a Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) approach designed for fine-tuning PLMs without the need for all weights. PEMA can be integrated into the context representation of test data during inference to execute downstream tasks. It leverages an external memory to store context representations generated by a PLM, mapped with the desired target word. Our method entails training LoRA-based weight matrices within the final layer of the PLM for enhanced efficiency. The probability is then interpolated with the next-word distribution from the PLM to perform downstream tasks. To improve the generation quality, we propose a novel interpolation strategy named Gradual Unrolling. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of PEMA with a syntactic dataset and assess its performance on machine translation and style transfer tasks using real datasets. PEMA outperforms other PEFT methods in terms of memory and latency efficiency for training and inference. Furthermore, it outperforms other baselines in preserving the meaning of sentences while generating appropriate language and styles.

When a model is trying to gather information in an interactive setting, it benefits from asking informative questions. However, in the case of a grounded multi-turn image identification task, previous studies have been constrained to polar yes/no questions, limiting how much information the model can gain in a single turn. We present an approach that formulates more informative, open-ended questions. In doing so, we discover that off-the-shelf visual question answering (VQA) models often make presupposition errors, which standard information gain question selection methods fail to account for. To address this issue, we propose a method that can incorporate presupposition handling into both question selection and belief updates. Specifically, we use a two-stage process, where the model first filters out images which are irrelevant to a given question, then updates its beliefs about which image the user intends. Through self-play and human evaluations, we show that our method is successful in asking informative open-ended questions, increasing accuracy over the past state-of-the-art by 14%, while resulting in 48% more efficient games in human evaluations.

As AI systems become more advanced and widely deployed, there will likely be increasing debate over whether AI systems could have conscious experiences, desires, or other states of potential moral significance. It is important to inform these discussions with empirical evidence to the extent possible. We argue that under the right circumstances, self-reports, or an AI system's statements about its own internal states, could provide an avenue for investigating whether AI systems have states of moral significance. Self-reports are the main way such states are assessed in humans ("Are you in pain?"), but self-reports from current systems like large language models are spurious for many reasons (e.g. often just reflecting what humans would say). To make self-reports more appropriate for this purpose, we propose to train models to answer many kinds of questions about themselves with known answers, while avoiding or limiting training incentives that bias self-reports. The hope of this approach is that models will develop introspection-like capabilities, and that these capabilities will generalize to questions about states of moral significance. We then propose methods for assessing the extent to which these techniques have succeeded: evaluating self-report consistency across contexts and between similar models, measuring the confidence and resilience of models' self-reports, and using interpretability to corroborate self-reports. We also discuss challenges for our approach, from philosophical difficulties in interpreting self-reports to technical reasons why our proposal might fail. We hope our discussion inspires philosophers and AI researchers to criticize and improve our proposed methodology, as well as to run experiments to test whether self-reports can be made reliable enough to provide information about states of moral significance.

With the increasing prevalence of Large Language Models, traditional full fine-tuning approaches face growing challenges, especially in memory-intensive tasks. This paper investigates the potential of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), for complex and under-explored multilingual summarisation tasks. We conduct an extensive study across different data availability scenarios, including full-data, low-data, and cross-lingual transfer, leveraging models of different sizes. Our findings reveal that LoRA lags behind full fine-tuning when trained with full data, however, it excels in low-data scenarios and cross-lingual transfer. Interestingly, as models scale up, the performance gap between LoRA and full fine-tuning diminishes. Additionally, we investigate effective strategies for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, finding that continued LoRA tuning achieves the best performance compared to both full fine-tuning and dynamic composition of language-specific LoRA modules.

Recent advances in Transformer-based Large Language Models have made great strides in natural language generation. However, to decode K tokens, an autoregressive model needs K sequential forward passes, which may be a performance bottleneck for large language models. Many non-autoregressive (NAR) research are aiming to address this sequentiality bottleneck, albeit many have focused on a dedicated architecture in supervised benchmarks. In this work, we studied unsupervised pretraining for non auto-regressive T5 models via unrolled denoising and shown its SoTA results in downstream generation tasks such as SQuAD question generation and XSum.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to engage in credible dialogues with humans, taking into account the training data and the context of the conversation, has raised discussions about their ability to exhibit intrinsic motivations, agency, or even some degree of consciousness. We argue that the internal architecture of LLMs and their finite and volatile state cannot support any of these properties. By combining insights from complementary learning systems, global neuronal workspace, and attention schema theories, we propose to integrate LLMs and other deep learning systems into an architecture for cognitive language agents able to exhibit properties akin to agency, self-motivation, even some features of meta-cognition.