Understanding the extent to which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generations align with a large language model's (LLM) internal computations is critical for deciding whether to trust an LLM's output. As a proxy for CoT faithfulness, Lanham et al. (2023) propose a metric that measures a model's dependence on its CoT for producing an answer. Within a single family of proprietary models, they find that LLMs exhibit a scaling-then-inverse-scaling relationship between model size and their measure of faithfulness, and that a 13 billion parameter model exhibits increased faithfulness compared to models ranging from 810 million to 175 billion parameters in size. We evaluate whether these results generalize as a property of all LLMs. We replicate the experimental setup in their section focused on scaling experiments with three different families of models and, under specific conditions, successfully reproduce the scaling trends for CoT faithfulness they report. However, after normalizing the metric to account for a model's bias toward certain answer choices, unfaithfulness drops significantly for smaller less-capable models. This normalized faithfulness metric is also strongly correlated ($R^2$=0.74) with accuracy, raising doubts about its validity for evaluating faithfulness.

Are the longstanding robustness issues in NLP resolved by today's larger and more performant models? To address this question, we conduct a thorough investigation using 19 models of different sizes spanning different architectural choices and pretraining objectives. We conduct evaluations using (a) OOD and challenge test sets, (b) CheckLists, (c) contrast sets, and (d) adversarial inputs. Our analysis reveals that not all OOD tests provide further insight into robustness. Evaluating with CheckLists and contrast sets shows significant gaps in model performance; merely scaling models does not make them sufficiently robust. Finally, we point out that current approaches for adversarial evaluations of models are themselves problematic: they can be easily thwarted, and in their current forms, do not represent a sufficiently deep probe of model robustness. We conclude that not only is the question of robustness in NLP as yet unresolved, but even some of the approaches to measure robustness need to be reassessed.

Our research explores the use of natural language processing (NLP) methods to automatically classify entities for the purpose of knowledge graph population and integration with food system ontologies. We have created NLP models that can automatically classify organizations with respect to categories associated with environmental issues as well as Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, which are used by the U.S. government to characterize business activities. As input, the NLP models are provided with text snippets retrieved by the Google search engine for each organization, which serves as a textual description of the organization that is used for learning. Our experimental results show that NLP models can achieve reasonably good performance for these two classification tasks, and they rely on a general framework that could be applied to many other classification problems as well. We believe that NLP models represent a promising approach for automatically harvesting information to populate knowledge graphs and aligning the information with existing ontologies through shared categories and concepts.