A Fully Parameter-Free Second-Order Algorithm for Convex-Concave Minimax Problems with Optimal Iteration Complexity

In this paper, we study second-order algorithms for the convex-concave minimax problem, which has attracted much attention in many fields such as machine learning in recent years. We propose a Lipschitz-free cubic regularization (LF-CR) algorithm for solving the convex-concave minimax optimization problem without knowing the Lipschitz constant. It can be shown that the iteration complexity of the LF-CR algorithm to obtain an $\epsilon$-optimal solution with respect to the restricted primal-dual gap is upper bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\frac{\rho\|z^0-z^*\|^3}{\epsilon})^{\frac{2}{3}}$, where $z^0=(x^0,y^0)$ is a pair of initial points, $z^*=(x^*,y^*)$ is a pair of optimal solutions, and $\rho$ is the Lipschitz constant. We further propose a fully parameter-free cubic regularization (FF-CR) algorithm that does not require any parameters of the problem, including the Lipschitz constant and the upper bound of the distance from the initial point to the optimal solution. We also prove that the iteration complexity of the FF-CR algorithm to obtain an $\epsilon$-optimal solution with respect to the gradient norm is upper bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\frac{\rho\|z^0-z^*\|^2}{\epsilon})^{\frac{2}{3}}$. Numerical experiments show the efficiency of both algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed FF-CR algorithm is the first completely parameter-free second-order algorithm for solving convex-concave minimax optimization problems, and its iteration complexity is consistent with the optimal iteration complexity lower bound of existing second-order algorithms with parameters for solving convex-concave minimax problems.

ReCaLL: Membership Inference via Relative Conditional Log-Likelihoods

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about the transparency and fair use of the pretraining data used for training them. Detecting such content is challenging due to the scale of the data and limited exposure of each instance during training. We propose ReCaLL (Relative Conditional Log-Likelihood), a novel membership inference attack (MIA) to detect LLMs' pretraining data by leveraging their conditional language modeling capabilities. ReCaLL examines the relative change in conditional log-likelihoods when prefixing target data points with non-member context. Our empirical findings show that conditioning member data on non-member prefixes induces a larger decrease in log-likelihood compared to non-member data. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show that ReCaLL achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WikiMIA dataset, even with random and synthetic prefixes, and can be further improved using an ensemble approach. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth analysis of LLMs' behavior with different membership contexts, providing insights into how LLMs leverage membership information for effective inference at both the sequence and token level.

Reasoning in Token Economies: Budget-Aware Evaluation of LLM Reasoning Strategies

A diverse array of reasoning strategies has been proposed to elicit the capabilities of large language models. However, in this paper, we point out that traditional evaluations which focus solely on performance metrics miss a key factor: the increased effectiveness due to additional compute. By overlooking this aspect, a skewed view of strategy efficiency is often presented. This paper introduces a framework that incorporates the compute budget into the evaluation, providing a more informative comparison that takes into account both performance metrics and computational cost. In this budget-aware perspective, we find that complex reasoning strategies often don't surpass simpler baselines purely due to algorithmic ingenuity, but rather due to the larger computational resources allocated. When we provide a simple baseline like chain-of-thought self-consistency with comparable compute resources, it frequently outperforms reasoning strategies proposed in the literature. In this scale-aware perspective, we find that unlike self-consistency, certain strategies such as multi-agent debate or Reflexion can become worse if more compute budget is utilized.

Raccoon: Prompt Extraction Benchmark of LLM-Integrated Applications

With the proliferation of LLM-integrated applications such as GPT-s, millions are deployed, offering valuable services through proprietary instruction prompts. These systems, however, are prone to prompt extraction attacks through meticulously designed queries. To help mitigate this problem, we introduce the Raccoon benchmark which comprehensively evaluates a model's susceptibility to prompt extraction attacks. Our novel evaluation method assesses models under both defenseless and defended scenarios, employing a dual approach to evaluate the effectiveness of existing defenses and the resilience of the models. The benchmark encompasses 14 categories of prompt extraction attacks, with additional compounded attacks that closely mimic the strategies of potential attackers, alongside a diverse collection of defense templates. This array is, to our knowledge, the most extensive compilation of prompt theft attacks and defense mechanisms to date. Our findings highlight universal susceptibility to prompt theft in the absence of defenses, with OpenAI models demonstrating notable resilience when protected. This paper aims to establish a more systematic benchmark for assessing LLM robustness against prompt extraction attacks, offering insights into their causes and potential countermeasures. Resources of Raccoon are publicly available at https://github.com/M0gician/RaccoonBench.

Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate substantial capabilities in natural language understanding and generation tasks. With the growing number of LLMs, how to harness the collective expertise of multiple LLMs is an exciting open direction. Toward this goal, we propose a new approach that leverages the collective strengths of multiple LLMs through a Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) methodology. In our approach, we construct a layered MoA architecture wherein each layer comprises multiple LLM agents. Each agent takes all the outputs from agents in the previous layer as auxiliary information in generating its response. MoA models achieves state-of-art performance on AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench and FLASK, surpassing GPT-4 Omni. For example, our MoA using only open-source LLMs is the leader of AlpacaEval 2.0 by a substantial gap, achieving a score of 65.1% compared to 57.5% by GPT-4 Omni.

FinRobot: An Open-Source AI Agent Platform for Financial Applications using Large Language Models

As financial institutions and professionals increasingly incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows, substantial barriers, including proprietary data and specialized knowledge, persist between the finance sector and the AI community. These challenges impede the AI community's ability to enhance financial tasks effectively. Acknowledging financial analysis's critical role, we aim to devise financial-specialized LLM-based toolchains and democratize access to them through open-source initiatives, promoting wider AI adoption in financial decision-making. In this paper, we introduce FinRobot, a novel open-source AI agent platform supporting multiple financially specialized AI agents, each powered by LLM. Specifically, the platform consists of four major layers: 1) the Financial AI Agents layer that formulates Financial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by breaking sophisticated financial problems down into logical sequences; 2) the Financial LLM Algorithms layer dynamically configures appropriate model application strategies for specific tasks; 3) the LLMOps and DataOps layer produces accurate models by applying training/fine-tuning techniques and using task-relevant data; 4) the Multi-source LLM Foundation Models layer that integrates various LLMs and enables the above layers to access them directly. Finally, FinRobot provides hands-on for both professional-grade analysts and laypersons to utilize powerful AI techniques for advanced financial analysis. We open-source FinRobot at \url{https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRobot}.

LLM-Resistant Math Word Problem Generation via Adversarial Attacks

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed the educational landscape. As current plagiarism detection tools struggle to keep pace with LLMs' rapid advancements, the educational community faces the challenge of assessing students' true problem-solving abilities in the presence of LLMs. In this work, we explore a new paradigm for ensuring fair evaluation -- generating adversarial examples which preserve the structure and difficulty of the original questions aimed for assessment, but are unsolvable by LLMs. Focusing on the domain of math word problems, we leverage abstract syntax trees to structurally generate adversarial examples that cause LLMs to produce incorrect answers by simply editing the numeric values in the problems. We conduct experiments on various open- and closed-source LLMs, quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrating that our method significantly degrades their math problem-solving ability. We identify shared vulnerabilities among LLMs and propose a cost-effective approach to attack high-cost models. Additionally, we conduct automatic analysis on math problems and investigate the cause of failure to guide future research on LLM's mathematical capability.

Maestro: A Gamified Platform for Teaching AI Robustness

Although the prevention of AI vulnerabilities is critical to preserve the safety and privacy of users and businesses, educational tools for robust AI are still underdeveloped worldwide. We present the design, implementation, and assessment of Maestro. Maestro is an effective open-source game-based platform that contributes to the advancement of robust AI education. Maestro provides goal-based scenarios where college students are exposed to challenging life-inspired assignments in a competitive programming environment. We assessed Maestro's influence on students' engagement, motivation, and learning success in robust AI. This work also provides insights into the design features of online learning tools that promote active learning opportunities in the robust AI domain. We analyzed the reflection responses (measured with Likert scales) of 147 undergraduate students using Maestro in two quarterly college courses in AI. According to the results, students who felt the acquisition of new skills in robust AI tended to appreciate highly Maestro and scored highly on material consolidation, curiosity, and mastery in robust AI. Moreover, the leaderboard, our key gamification element in Maestro, has effectively contributed to students' engagement and learning. Results also indicate that Maestro can be effectively adapted to any course length and depth without losing its educational quality.

NeuroComparatives: Neuro-Symbolic Distillation of Comparative Knowledge

Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we study the task of comparative knowledge acquisition, motivated by the dramatic improvements in the capabilities of extreme-scale language models like GPT-3, which have fueled efforts towards harvesting their knowledge into knowledge bases. However, access to inference API for such models is limited, thereby restricting the scope and the diversity of the knowledge acquisition. We thus ask a seemingly implausible question: whether more accessible, yet considerably smaller and weaker models such as GPT-2, can be utilized to acquire comparative knowledge, such that the resulting quality is on par with their large-scale counterparts? We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation using lexically-constrained decoding, followed by stringent filtering of generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects and results in a corpus of 8.7M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources (up to 32% absolute improvement), even including GPT-3, despite using a 100X smaller model. Our results motivate neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models as a cost-effective alternative to the currently dominant practice of relying on extreme-scale language models with limited inference access.

Primal Dual Alternating Proximal Gradient Algorithms for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Minimax Problems with Coupled Linear Constraints

Nonconvex minimax problems have attracted wide attention in machine learning, signal processing and many other fields in recent years. In this paper, we propose a primal dual alternating proximal gradient (PDAPG) algorithm and a primal dual proximal gradient (PDPG-L) algorithm for solving nonsmooth nonconvex-strongly concave and nonconvex-linear minimax problems with coupled linear constraints, respectively. The corresponding iteration complexity of the two algorithms are proved to be $\mathcal{O}\left( \varepsilon ^{-2} \right)$ and $\mathcal{O}\left( \varepsilon ^{-3} \right)$ to reach an $\varepsilon$-stationary point, respectively. To our knowledge, they are the first two algorithms with iteration complexity guarantee for solving the two classes of minimax problems.