Over the past ten years, modern natural language processing models have revolutionised the field of artificial intelligence, transforming how computers understand and generate language. ChatGPT is one key example of how AI technology is becoming increasingly important in generating more and more precise human-like responses to a wide variety of problems, including business ones. These advancements have significant implications for the financial industry, where vast amounts of regulatory data and policies must be analysed and understood in order to comply with laws and regulations.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is essential in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Traditional NER models are effective but limited to a set of predefined entity types. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) can extract arbitrary entities through natural language instructions, offering greater flexibility. However, their size and cost, particularly for those accessed via APIs like ChatGPT, make them impractical in resource-limited scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a compact NER model trained to identify any type of entity. Leveraging a bidirectional transformer encoder, our model, GLiNER, facilitates parallel entity extraction, an advantage over the slow sequential token generation of LLMs. Through comprehensive testing, GLiNER demonstrate strong performance, outperforming both ChatGPT and fine-tuned LLMs in zero-shot evaluations on various NER benchmarks.

An important open question pertaining to the use of large language models for knowledge-intensive tasks is how to effectively integrate knowledge from three sources: the model's parametric memory, external structured knowledge, and external unstructured knowledge. Most existing prompting methods either rely solely on one or two of these sources, or require repeatedly invoking large language models to generate similar or identical content. In this work, we overcome these limitations by introducing a novel semi-structured prompting approach that seamlessly integrates the model's parametric memory with unstructured knowledge from text documents and structured knowledge from knowledge graphs. Experimental results on open-domain multi-hop question answering datasets demonstrate that our prompting method significantly surpasses existing techniques, even exceeding those which require fine-tuning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are central to a multitude of applications but struggle with significant risks, notably in generating harmful content and biases. Drawing an analogy to the human psyche's conflict between evolutionary survival instincts and societal norm adherence elucidated in Freud's psychoanalysis theory, we argue that LLMs suffer a similar fundamental conflict, arising between their inherent desire for syntactic and semantic continuity, established during the pre-training phase, and the post-training alignment with human values. This conflict renders LLMs vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein intensifying the models' desire for continuity can circumvent alignment efforts, resulting in the generation of harmful information. Through a series of experiments, we first validated the existence of the desire for continuity in LLMs, and further devised a straightforward yet powerful technique, such as incomplete sentences, negative priming, and cognitive dissonance scenarios, to demonstrate that even advanced LLMs struggle to prevent the generation of harmful information. In summary, our study uncovers the root of LLMs' vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks, hereby questioning the efficacy of solely relying on sophisticated alignment methods, and further advocates for a new training idea that integrates modal concepts alongside traditional amodal concepts, aiming to endow LLMs with a more nuanced understanding of real-world contexts and ethical considerations.

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. They enable fine-grained evaluations of model aspects that would otherwise go unnoticed in standard evaluation datasets, but they do not address the problem of how to fix the failure cases. Previous work has explored functionality learning by fine-tuning models on suite data. While this improves performance on seen functionalities, it often does not generalize to unseen ones and can harm general performance. This paper analyses a fine-tuning-free approach to functionality learning. For each functionality in a suite, we generate a specification instruction that encodes it. We combine the obtained specification instructions to create specification-augmented prompts, which we feed to language models pre-trained on natural instruction data to generate suite predictions. A core aspect of our analysis is to measure the effect that including a set of specifications has on a held-out set of unseen, qualitatively different specifications. Our experiments across four tasks and models ranging from 80M to 175B parameters show that smaller models struggle to follow specification instructions. However, larger models (> 3B params.) can benefit from specifications and even generalize desirable behaviors across functionalities.

Recently, work in NLP has shifted to few-shot (in-context) learning, with large language models (LLMs) performing well across a range of tasks. However, while fairness evaluations have become a standard for supervised methods, little is known about the fairness of LLMs as prediction systems. Further, common standard methods for fairness involve access to models weights or are applied during finetuning, which are not applicable in few-shot learning. Do LLMs exhibit prediction biases when used for standard NLP tasks? In this work, we explore the effect of shots, which directly affect the performance of models, on the fairness of LLMs as NLP classification systems. We consider how different shot selection strategies, both existing and new demographically sensitive methods, affect model fairness across three standard fairness datasets. We discuss how future work can include LLM fairness evaluations.

Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the ability to model unusual, unexpected, and unlikely situations, we explore the task of uncommonsense abductive reasoning. Given a piece of context with an unexpected outcome, this task requires reasoning abductively to generate a natural language explanation that makes the unexpected outcome more likely in the context. To this end, we curate and release a new English language corpus called UNcommonsense. We characterize the differences between the performance of human explainers and the best performing large language models, finding that model-enhanced human-written explanations achieve the highest quality by trading off between specificity and diversity. Finally, we experiment with several online imitation learning algorithms to train open and accessible language models on this task. When compared with the vanilla supervised fine-tuning approach, these methods consistently reduce lose rates on both common and uncommonsense abductive reasoning judged by human evaluators.

Watermarking generative models consists of planting a statistical signal (watermark) in a model's output so that it can be later verified that the output was generated by the given model. A strong watermarking scheme satisfies the property that a computationally bounded attacker cannot erase the watermark without causing significant quality degradation. In this paper, we study the (im)possibility of strong watermarking schemes. We prove that, under well-specified and natural assumptions, strong watermarking is impossible to achieve. This holds even in the private detection algorithm setting, where the watermark insertion and detection algorithms share a secret key, unknown to the attacker. To prove this result, we introduce a generic efficient watermark attack; the attacker is not required to know the private key of the scheme or even which scheme is used. Our attack is based on two assumptions: (1) The attacker has access to a "quality oracle" that can evaluate whether a candidate output is a high-quality response to a prompt, and (2) The attacker has access to a "perturbation oracle" which can modify an output with a nontrivial probability of maintaining quality, and which induces an efficiently mixing random walk on high-quality outputs. We argue that both assumptions can be satisfied in practice by an attacker with weaker computational capabilities than the watermarked model itself, to which the attacker has only black-box access. Furthermore, our assumptions will likely only be easier to satisfy over time as models grow in capabilities and modalities. We demonstrate the feasibility of our attack by instantiating it to attack three existing watermarking schemes for large language models: Kirchenbauer et al. (2023), Kuditipudi et al. (2023), and Zhao et al. (2023). The same attack successfully removes the watermarks planted by all three schemes, with only minor quality degradation.

Chain-of-Thought(CoT) prompting and its variants explore equipping large language models (LLMs) with high-level reasoning abilities by emulating human-like linear cognition and logic. However, the human mind is complicated and mixed with both linear and nonlinear thinking. In this work, we propose \textbf{I}nferential \textbf{E}xclusion \textbf{P}rompting (IEP), a novel prompting that combines the principles of elimination and inference in order to guide LLMs to think non-linearly. IEP guides LLMs to plan and then utilize Natural Language Inference (NLI) to deduce each possible solution's entailment relation with context, commonsense, or facts, therefore yielding a broader perspective by thinking back for inferring. This forward planning and backward eliminating process allows IEP to better simulate the complex human thinking processes compared to other CoT-based methods, which only reflect linear cognitive processes. We conducted a series of empirical studies and have corroborated that IEP consistently outperforms CoT across various tasks. Additionally, we observe that integrating IEP and CoT further improves the LLMs' performance on certain tasks, highlighting the necessity of equipping LLMs with mixed logic processes. Moreover, to better evaluate comprehensive features inherent in human logic, we introduce \textbf{M}ental-\textbf{A}bility \textbf{R}easoning \textbf{B}enchmark (MARB). The benchmark comprises six novel subtasks with a total of 9,115 questions, among which 1,685 are developed with hand-crafted rationale references. We believe both \textsc{IEP} and \textsc{MARB} can serve as a promising direction for unveiling LLMs' logic and verbal reasoning abilities and drive further advancements. \textsc{MARB} will be available at ~\texttt{anonymity link} soon.

ChatGPT represents a significant milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), finding widespread applications across diverse domains. However, its effectiveness in mathematical contexts has been somewhat constrained by its susceptibility to conceptual errors. Concurrently, topological data analysis (TDA), a relatively new discipline, has garnered substantial interest in recent years. Nonetheless, the advancement of TDA is impeded by the limited understanding of computational algorithms and coding proficiency among theoreticians. This work endeavors to bridge the gap between theoretical topological concepts and their practical implementation in computational topology through the utilization of ChatGPT. We showcase how a pure theoretician, devoid of computational experience and coding skills, can effectively transform mathematical formulations and concepts into functional code for computational topology with the assistance of ChatGPT. Our strategy outlines a productive process wherein a mathematician trains ChatGPT on pure mathematical concepts, steers ChatGPT towards generating computational topology code, and subsequently validates the generated code using established examples. Our specific case studies encompass the computation of Betti numbers, Laplacian matrices, and Dirac matrices for simplicial complexes, as well as the persistence of various homologies and Laplacians. Furthermore, we explore the application of ChatGPT in computing recently developed topological theories for hypergraphs and digraphs. This work serves as an initial step towards effectively transforming pure mathematical theories into practical computational tools, with the ultimate goal of enabling real applications across diverse fields.