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HuRef: HUman-REadable Fingerprint for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, identifying the original base model of an LLM is challenging due to potential parameter alterations. In thisstudy, we introduce HuRef, a human-readable fingerprint for LLMs that uniquely identifies the base model without interfering with training or exposing model parameters to the public.We first observe that the vector direction of LLM parameters remains stable after the model has converged during pretraining, with negligible perturbations through subsequent training steps, including continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and RLHF, which makes it a sufficient conditionto identify the base model.The necessity is validated by continuing to train an LLM with an extra term to drive away the model parameters' direction and the model becomes damaged. However, this direction is vulnerable to simple attacks like dimension permutation or matrix rotation, which significantly change it without affecting performance. To address this, leveraging the Transformer structure, we systematically analyze potential attacks and define three invariant terms that identify an LLM's base model. Due to the potential risk of information leakage, we cannot publish invariant terms directly. Instead, we map them to a Gaussian vector using an encoder, then convert it into a natural image using StyleGAN2, and finally publish the image. In our black-box setting, all fingerprinting steps are internally conducted by the LLMs owners. To ensure the published fingerprints are honestly generated, we introduced Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP).Experimental results across various LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.


Adapting to Unknown Low-Dimensional Structures in Score-Based Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper investigates score-based diffusion models when the underlying target distribution is concentrated on or near low-dimensional manifolds within the higher-dimensional space in which they formally reside, a common characteristic of natural image distributions. Despite previous efforts to understand the data generation process of diffusion models, existing theoretical support remains highly suboptimal in the presence of low-dimensional structure, which we strengthen in this paper. For the popular Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), we find that the dependency of the error incurred within each denoising step on the ambient dimension $d$ is in general unavoidable. We further identify a unique design of coefficients that yields a converges rate at the order of $O(k^{2}/\sqrt{T})$ (up to log factors), where $k$ is the intrinsic dimension of the target distribution and $T$ is the number of steps. This represents the first theoretical demonstration that the DDPM sampler can adapt to unknown low-dimensional structures in the target distribution, highlighting the critical importance of coefficient design. All of this is achieved by a novel set of analysis tools that characterize the algorithmic dynamics in a more deterministic manner.


Gradient Cuff: Detecting Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models by Exploring Refusal Loss Landscapes

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a prominent generative AI tool, where the user enters a query and the LLM generates an answer. To reduce harm and misuse, efforts have been made to align these LLMs to human values using advanced training techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, recent studies have highlighted the vulnerability of LLMs to adversarial jailbreak attempts aiming at subverting the embedded safety guardrails.


Adversarial Representation Engineering: A General Model Editing Framework for Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success, understanding and rectifying their internal complex mechanisms has become an urgent issue. Recent research has attempted to interpret their behaviors through the lens of inner representation. However, developing practical and efficient methods for applying these representations for general and flexible model editing remains challenging. In this work, we explore how to leverage insights from representation engineering to guide the editing of LLMs by deploying a representation discriminator as an editing oracle. We first identify the importance of a robust and reliable discriminator during editing, then propose an \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{E}ngineering (\textbf{ARE}) framework to provide a unified and interpretable approach for conceptual model editing without compromising baseline performance. Experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of ARE in various model editing scenarios.


Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization in Direct Alignment Algorithms

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)has been crucial to the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), however it is often a complex and brittle process. In the classical RLHF framework, a reward model is first trained to represent human preferences, which is in turn used by an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to optimized the LLM. A prominent issue with such methods is reward over-optimization or reward hacking, where the performance as measured by the learned proxy reward model increases, but the true model quality plateaus or even deteriorates. Direct Alignment Algorithms (DDAs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have emerged as alternatives to the classical RLHF pipeline. However, despite not training a separate proxy reward model or using RL, they still commonly deteriorate from over-optimization. While the so-called reward hacking phenomenon is not well-defined for DAAs, we still uncover similar trends: at higher KL-budgets, DAA algorithms exhibit similar degradation patters to their classic RLHF counterparts. In particular, we find that DAA methods deteriorate not only across a wide range of KL-budgets, but also often before even a single epoch of the dataset is completed. Through extensive empirical experimentation this work formulates the reward over-optimization or hacking problem for DAAs and explores its consequences across objectives, training regimes, and model scales.


Slight Corruption in Pre-training Data Makes Better Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion models (DMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in generating realistic high-quality images, audios, and videos. They benefit significantly from extensive pre-training on large-scale datasets, including web-crawled data with paired data and conditions, such as image-text and image-class pairs.Despite rigorous filtering, these pre-training datasets often inevitably contain corrupted pairs where conditions do not accurately describe the data. This paper presents the first comprehensive study on the impact of such corruption in pre-training data of DMs.We synthetically corrupt ImageNet-1K and CC3M to pre-train and evaluate over $50$ conditional DMs. Our empirical findings reveal that various types of slight corruption in pre-training can significantly enhance the quality, diversity, and fidelity of the generated images across different DMs, both during pre-training and downstream adaptation stages. Theoretically, we consider a Gaussian mixture model and prove that slight corruption in the condition leads to higher entropy and a reduced 2-Wasserstein distance to the ground truth of the data distribution generated by the corruptly trained DMs.Inspired by our analysis, we propose a simple method to improve the training of DMs on practical datasets by adding condition embedding perturbations (CEP).CEP significantly improves the performance of various DMs in both pre-training and downstream tasks.We hope that our study provides new insights into understanding the data and pre-training processes of DMs.


AMOR: A Recipe for Building Adaptable Modular Knowledge Agents Through Process Feedback

Neural Information Processing Systems

The notable success of large language models (LLMs) has sparked an upsurge in building language agents to complete various complex tasks. We present AMOR, an agent framework based on open-source LLMs, which reasons with external knowledge bases and adapts to specific domains through human supervision to the reasoning process. AMOR builds reasoning logic over a finite state machine (FSM)that solves problems through autonomous executions and transitions over disentangled modules. This allows humans to provide direct feedback to the individual modules, and thus naturally forms process supervision. Based on this reasoning and feedback framework, we develop AMOR through two-stage fine-tuning: warm-up and adaptation. The former fine-tunes the LLM with examples automatically constructed from various public datasets, enabling AMOR to generalize across different knowledge environments, while the latter tailors AMOR to specific domains using process feedback. Extensive experiments across multiple domains demonstrate the advantage of AMOR to strong baselines, thanks to its FSM-based reasoning and process feedback mechanism.


Improved Algorithms for Contextual Dynamic Pricing

Neural Information Processing Systems

In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations.The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that collects as much revenue as possible. We focus on two different valuation models. The first assumes that valuations linearly depend on the context and are further distorted by noise. Under minor regularity assumptions, our algorithm achieves an optimal regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{2/3})$, improving the existing results. The second model removes the linearity assumption, requiring only that the expected buyer valuation is $\beta$-H\older in the context. For this model, our algorithm obtains a regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{d+2\beta/d+3\beta})$, where $d$ is the dimension of the context space.


Bandits with Abstention under Expert Advice

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the classic problem of prediction with expert advice under bandit feedback. Our model assumes that one action, corresponding to the learner's abstention from play, has no reward or loss on every trial. We propose the CBA (Confidence-rated Bandits with Abstentions) algorithm, which exploits this assumption to obtain reward bounds that can significantly improve those of the classical Exp4 algorithm. Our problem can be construed as the aggregation of confidence-rated predictors, with the learner having the option to abstain from play. We are the first to achieve bounds on the expected cumulative reward for general confidence-rated predictors. In the special case of specialists, we achieve a novel reward bound, significantly improving previous bounds of SpecialistExp (treating abstention as another action). We discuss how CBA can be applied to the problem of adversarial contextual bandits with the option of abstaining from selecting any action. We are able to leverage a wide range of inductive biases, outperforming previous approaches both theoretically and in preliminary experimental analysis. Additionally, we achieve a reduction in runtime from quadratic to almost linear in the number of contexts for the specific case of metric space contexts.


SELF-DISCOVER: Large Language Models Self-Compose Reasoning Structures

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning modules such as critical thinking and step-by-step thinking, and compose them into an explicit reasoning structure for LLMs to follow during decoding. SELF-DISCOVER substantially improves GPT-4 and PaLM 2's performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as BigBench-Hard, grounded agent reasoning, and MATH, by as much as 32% compared to Chain of Thought (CoT). Furthermore, SELF-DISCOVER outperforms inference-intensive methods such as CoT-Self-Consistency by more than 20%, while requiring 10-40x fewer inference compute. Finally, we show that the self-discovered reasoning structures are universally applicable across model families: from PaLM 2-L to GPT-4, and from GPT-4 to Llama2, and share commonalities with human reasoning patterns.