Large language models (LLMs) are now highly capable at a diverse range of tasks. This paper studies whether or not GPT-4, one such LLM, is capable of assisting researchers in the field of adversarial machine learning. As a case study, we evaluate the robustness of AI-Guardian, a recent defense to adversarial examples published at IEEE S&P 2023, a top computer security conference. We completely break this defense: the proposed scheme does not increase robustness compared to an undefended baseline. We write none of the code to attack this model, and instead prompt GPT-4 to implement all attack algorithms following our instructions and guidance. This process was surprisingly effective and efficient, with the language model at times producing code from ambiguous instructions faster than the author of this paper could have done. We conclude by discussing (1) the warning signs present in the evaluation that suggested to us AI-Guardian would be broken, and (2) our experience with designing attacks and performing novel research using the most recent advances in language modeling.

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of these applications, the cost of acquiring the human feedback can be substantial or even prohibitive. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that often the agent can choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback in order to most efficiently identify a good policy, and introduce the offline contextual dueling bandit setting. We give an upper-confidence-bound style algorithm for this setting and prove a regret bound. We also give empirical confirmation that this method outperforms a similar strategy that uses uniformly sampled contexts.

Recent work has shown that language models' (LMs) prompt-based learning capabilities make them well suited for automating data labeling in domains where manual annotation is expensive. The challenge is that while writing an initial prompt is cheap, improving a prompt is costly -- practitioners often require significant labeled data in order to evaluate the impact of prompt modifications. Our work asks whether it is possible to improve prompt-based learning without additional labeled data. We approach this problem by attempting to modify the predictions of a prompt, rather than the prompt itself. Our intuition is that accurate predictions should also be consistent: samples which are similar under some feature representation should receive the same prompt prediction. We propose Embroid, a method which computes multiple representations of a dataset under different embedding functions, and uses the consistency between the LM predictions for neighboring samples to identify mispredictions. Embroid then uses these neighborhoods to create additional predictions for each sample, and combines these predictions with a simple latent variable graphical model in order to generate a final corrected prediction. In addition to providing a theoretical analysis of Embroid, we conduct a rigorous empirical evaluation across six different LMs and up to 95 different tasks. We find that (1) Embroid substantially improves performance over original prompts (e.g., by an average of 7.3 points on GPT-JT), (2) also realizes improvements for more sophisticated prompting strategies (e.g., chain-of-thought), and (3) can be specialized to domains like law through the embedding functions.

Multimodal learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. Despite years of development in this field, it still remains challenging to design a unified network for processing various modalities ($\textit{e.g.}$ natural language, 2D images, 3D point clouds, audio, video, time series, tabular data) due to the inherent gaps among them. In this work, we propose a framework, named Meta-Transformer, that leverages a $\textbf{frozen}$ encoder to perform multimodal perception without any paired multimodal training data. In Meta-Transformer, the raw input data from various modalities are mapped into a shared token space, allowing a subsequent encoder with frozen parameters to extract high-level semantic features of the input data. Composed of three main components: a unified data tokenizer, a modality-shared encoder, and task-specific heads for downstream tasks, Meta-Transformer is the first framework to perform unified learning across 12 modalities with unpaired data. Experiments on different benchmarks reveal that Meta-Transformer can handle a wide range of tasks including fundamental perception (text, image, point cloud, audio, video), practical application (X-Ray, infrared, hyperspectral, and IMU), and data mining (graph, tabular, and time-series). Meta-Transformer indicates a promising future for developing unified multimodal intelligence with transformers. Code will be available at https://github.com/invictus717/MetaTransformer

Online job ads serve as a valuable source of information for skill requirements, playing a crucial role in labor market analysis and e-recruitment processes. Since such ads are typically formatted in free text, natural language processing (NLP) technologies are required to automatically process them. We specifically focus on the task of detecting skills (mentioned literally, or implicitly described) and linking them to a large skill ontology, making it a challenging case of extreme multi-label classification (XMLC). Given that there is no sizable labeled (training) dataset are available for this specific XMLC task, we propose techniques to leverage general Large Language Models (LLMs). We describe a cost-effective approach to generate an accurate, fully synthetic labeled dataset for skill extraction, and present a contrastive learning strategy that proves effective in the task. Our results across three skill extraction benchmarks show a consistent increase of between 15 to 25 percentage points in \textit{R-Precision@5} compared to previously published results that relied solely on distant supervision through literal matches.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in comprehending complex instructions. However, their blind adherence to provided instructions has led to concerns regarding risks of malicious use. Existing defence mechanisms, such as model fine-tuning or output censorship using LLMs, have proven to be fallible, as LLMs can still generate problematic responses. Commonly employed censorship approaches treat the issue as a machine learning problem and rely on another LM to detect undesirable content in LLM outputs. In this paper, we present the theoretical limitations of such semantic censorship approaches. Specifically, we demonstrate that semantic censorship can be perceived as an undecidable problem, highlighting the inherent challenges in censorship that arise due to LLMs' programmatic and instruction-following capabilities. Furthermore, we argue that the challenges extend beyond semantic censorship, as knowledgeable attackers can reconstruct impermissible outputs from a collection of permissible ones. As a result, we propose that the problem of censorship needs to be reevaluated; it should be treated as a security problem which warrants the adaptation of security-based approaches to mitigate potential risks.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SS-MDE) has the potential to scale to vast quantities of data. Unfortunately, existing approaches limit themselves to the automotive domain, resulting in models incapable of generalizing to complex environments such as natural or indoor settings. To address this, we propose a large-scale SlowTV dataset curated from YouTube, containing an order of magnitude more data than existing automotive datasets. SlowTV contains 1.7M images from a rich diversity of environments, such as worldwide seasonal hiking, scenic driving and scuba diving. Using this dataset, we train an SS-MDE model that provides zero-shot generalization to a large collection of indoor/outdoor datasets. The resulting model outperforms all existing SSL approaches and closes the gap on supervised SoTA, despite using a more efficient architecture. We additionally introduce a collection of best-practices to further maximize performance and zero-shot generalization. This includes 1) aspect ratio augmentation, 2) camera intrinsic estimation, 3) support frame randomization and 4) flexible motion estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/jspenmar/slowtv_monodepth.

As the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) progresses at a breathtaking pace, the application of large language models (LLMs) as AI Agents in robotics remains in its nascent stage. A significant concern that hampers the seamless integration of these AI Agents into robotics is the unpredictability of the content they generate, a phenomena known as ``hallucination''. Drawing inspiration from biological neural systems, we propose a novel, layered architecture for autonomous robotics, bridging AI agent intelligence and robot instinct. In this context, we define Robot Instinct as the innate or learned set of responses and priorities in an autonomous robotic system that ensures survival-essential tasks, such as safety assurance and obstacle avoidance, are carried out in a timely and effective manner. This paradigm harmoniously combines the intelligence of LLMs with the instinct of robotic behaviors, contributing to a more safe and versatile autonomous robotic system. As a case study, we illustrate this paradigm within the context of a mobile robot, demonstrating its potential to significantly enhance autonomous robotics and enabling a future where robots can operate independently and safely across diverse environments.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative training among different parties. Unlike traditional centralized learning, which requires collecting data from each party, FL allows clients to share privacy-preserving information without exposing private datasets. This approach not only guarantees enhanced privacy protection but also facilitates more efficient and secure collaboration among multiple participants. Therefore, FL has gained considerable attention from researchers, promoting numerous surveys to summarize the related works. However, the majority of these surveys concentrate on methods sharing model parameters during the training process, while overlooking the potential of sharing other forms of local information. In this paper, we present a systematic survey from a new perspective, i.e., what to share in FL, with an emphasis on the model utility, privacy leakage, and communication efficiency. This survey differs from previous ones due to four distinct contributions. First, we present a new taxonomy of FL methods in terms of the sharing methods, which includes three categories of shared information: model sharing, synthetic data sharing, and knowledge sharing. Second, we analyze the vulnerability of different sharing methods to privacy attacks and review the defense mechanisms that provide certain privacy guarantees. Third, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance and communication overhead of various sharing methods in FL. Besides, we assess the potential privacy leakage through model inversion and membership inference attacks, while comparing the effectiveness of various defense approaches. Finally, we discuss potential deficiencies in current methods and outline future directions for improvement.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable progress on many mathematical benchmarks. However, most of these benchmarks only feature problems grounded in junior and senior high school subjects, contain only multiple-choice questions, and are confined to a limited scope of elementary arithmetic operations. To address these issues, this paper introduces an expansive benchmark suite SciBench that aims to systematically examine the reasoning capabilities required for complex scientific problem solving. SciBench contains two carefully curated datasets: an open set featuring a range of collegiate-level scientific problems drawn from mathematics, chemistry, and physics textbooks, and a closed set comprising problems from undergraduate-level exams in computer science and mathematics. Based on the two datasets, we conduct an in-depth benchmark study of two representative LLMs with various prompting strategies. The results reveal that current LLMs fall short of delivering satisfactory performance, with an overall score of merely 35.80%. Furthermore, through a detailed user study, we categorize the errors made by LLMs into ten problem-solving abilities. Our analysis indicates that no single prompting strategy significantly outperforms others and some strategies that demonstrate improvements in certain problem-solving skills result in declines in other skills. We envision that SciBench will catalyze further developments in the reasoning abilities of LLMs, thereby ultimately contributing to scientific research and discovery.