Large Language Model
Approximating Online Human Evaluation of Social Chatbots with Prompting
Svikhnushina, Ekaterina, Pu, Pearl
As conversational models become increasingly available to the general public, users are engaging with this technology in social interactions. Such unprecedented interaction experiences may pose considerable social and psychological risks to the users unless the technology is properly controlled. This highlights the need for scalable and robust evaluation metrics for conversational chatbots. Existing evaluation metrics aim to automate offline user evaluation and approximate human judgment of pre-curated dialogs. However, they are limited in their ability to capture subjective perceptions of users who actually interact with the bots and might not generalize to real-world settings. To address this limitation, we propose an approach to approximate online human evaluation leveraging large language models (LLMs) from the GPT family. We introduce a new Dialog system Evaluation framework based on Prompting (DEP), which enables a fully automatic evaluation pipeline that replicates live user studies and achieves an impressive correlation with human judgment (up to Pearson r=0.95 on a system level). The DEP approach involves collecting synthetic chat logs of evaluated bots with an LLM in the other-play setting, where the LLM is carefully conditioned to follow a specific scenario. We further explore different prompting approaches to produce evaluation scores with the same LLM. The best performing prompts, which contain few-shot demonstrations and instructions, show outstanding performance on the tested dataset and demonstrate the ability to generalize to other dialog corpora.
Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey
Chang, Tyler A., Bergen, Benjamin K.
Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. Despite dramatic increases in generated text quality as models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters, the models are still prone to unfactual responses, commonsense errors, memorized text, and social biases. Many of these weaknesses can be framed as over-generalizations or under-generalizations of learned patterns in text. We synthesize recent results to highlight what is currently known about large language model capabilities, thus providing a resource for applied work and for research in adjacent fields that use language models.
Grimm in Wonderland: Prompt Engineering with Midjourney to Illustrate Fairytales
The quality of text-to-image generation is continuously improving, yet the boundaries of its applicability are still unclear. In particular, refinement of the text input with the objective of achieving better results - commonly called prompt engineering - so far seems to have not been geared towards work with pre-existing texts. We investigate whether text-to-image generation and prompt engineering could be used to generate basic illustrations of popular fairytales. Using Midjourney v4, we engage in action research with a dual aim: to attempt to generate 5 believable illustrations for each of 5 popular fairytales, and to define a prompt engineering process that starts from a pre-existing text and arrives at an illustration of it. We arrive at a tentative 4-stage process: i) initial prompt, ii) composition adjustment, iii) style refinement, and iv) variation selection. We also discuss three reasons why the generation model struggles with certain illustrations: difficulties with counts, bias from stereotypical configurations and inability to depict overly fantastic situations. Our findings are not limited to the specific generation model and are intended to be generalisable to future ones.
Wikipedia Will Survive A.I.
Welcome to Source Notes, a Future Tense column about the internet's information ecosystem. Wikipedia is, to date, the largest and most-read reference work in human history. But the editors who update and maintain Wikipedia are certainly not complacent about its place as the preeminent information resource, and are worried about how it might be displaced by generative A.I. At last week's Wikimania, the site's annual user conference, one of the sessions was "ChatGPT vs. WikiGPT," and a panelist at the event mentioned that rather than visiting Wikipedia, people seem to being going to ChatGPT for their information needs. Veteran Wikipedians have couched ChatGPT as an existential threat, predicting that A.I. chatbots will supplant Wikipedia in the same way that Wikipedia infamously dethroned Encyclopedia Britannica back in 2005.
The Myth of 'Open Source' AI
ChatGPT made it possible for anyone to play with powerful artificial intelligence, but the inner workings of the world-famous chatbot remain a closely guarded secret. In recent months, however, efforts to make AI more "open" seem to have gained momentum. In May, someone leaked a model from Meta, called Llama, which gave outsiders access to its underlying code as well as the "weights" that determine how it behaves. Then, this July, Meta chose to make an even more powerful model, called Llama 2, available for anyone to download, modify, and reuse. Meta's models have since become an extremely popular foundation for many companies, researchers, and hobbyists building tools and applications with ChatGPT-like capabilities.
The Smallness of Large Language Models
After an initial period of enthusiasm, attitudes toward generative AI (embodied as GPT) have soured. A flurry of polls revealed the shift in mood. One showed 70% of respondents had little or no trust that GPT can provide accurate information. Respondents see great dangers to society from misinformation that cannot be detected, and they fear that when GPT is put into search engine interfaces, reliable fact checking will be impossible. Another poll showed 70% wanted to see some kind of regulation or ban on commercial rollout to allow time to head off the dangers.
Distilling What We Know
The sheer size and complexity of today's generative pretrained transformer (GPT) models is nothing less than astounding. OpenAI's GPT-3, for example, possesses somewhere in the neighborhood of 175 billion parameters, and there is speculation GPT-4 could have as many as 10 trillion parameters.a All of this introduces enormous overhead in terms of required cloud resources, including compute cycles and energy consumption. At the moment, the computer power required to train state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) models is rising at a rate of 15x every two years.b The cost of training a large GPT model can run into the millions of dollars.c
Meta Releases Code Llama, a Coding Version of Llama 2
When Meta released Llama 2, a powerful artificial intelligence model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, last month, it made it possible for developers, startups, and researchers to play with the kind of AI that has enthralled the world for nearly a year. Today, Meta is following up with the release of Code Llama, a version of the model that has been tuned for programming tasks. The release could mean more developers getting a taste of AI-assisted coding. It could also inspire new ways of embedding AI into software. And it could help further establish Meta as the preeminent supplier of "open" AI tools.
Vivek Ramaswamy Emerges as the Republican Pete Buttigieg, in That the Other Candidates Hate Him
On Wednesday night in Milwaukee, eight Republicans trailing Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential primary gathered for the cycle's first debate and, with a clear and united voice, denounced one man: Vivek Ramaswamy. With Trump running away with the race and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis behind him in a clear (if tenuous) second, it was somehow the 38-year-old Ramaswamy who took the most direct hits. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's was likely the most memorable: After two of Ramaswamy's high-energy, relentlessly locquacious answers, Christie described him as "a guy who sounds like ChatGPT." Former vice president Mike Pence made a glaringly condescending reference to Ramaswamy "learning on the job," to which the crowd responded with a deserved oooooh. The Super PAC that supports DeSantis called Ramaswamy a fraud on Twitter, while you can see former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's opinion of him expressed nonverbally above.
Domain-specific ChatBots for Science using Embeddings
Artificial intelligence and machine-learning (AI/ML) methods are growing in sophistication and capability. The application of these methods to the physical sciences is correspondingly seeing enormous growth.[1] Recent years have seen the convergence of several new trends. Generative AI seeks to create novel outputs that conform to the structure of training data,[2, 3] for instance enabling image synthesis[4-6] or text generation. Large language models (LLMs) are generative neural networks trained on text completion, but which can be used for a variety of tasks, including sentiment analysis, code completion, document generation, or for interactive chatbots that respond to users in natural language.[7] The most successful implementations of this concept--such as the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)[8]-- exploit the transformer architecture,[9] which has a self-attention mechanism, allowing the model to weigh the relevance of each input in a sequence and capture the contextual dependencies between words regardless of their distance from each other in the text sequence. LLMs are part of a general trend in ML towards foundation models--extensive training of large deep neural networks on enormous datasets in a task-agnostic manner.[7,