Rethinking Prompt-based Debiasing in Large Language Models

Investigating bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for developing trustworthy AI. While prompt-based through prompt engineering is common, its effectiveness relies on the assumption that models inherently understand biases. Our study systematically analyzed this assumption using the BBQ and StereoSet benchmarks on both open-source models as well as commercial GPT model. Experimental results indicate that prompt-based is often superficial; for instance, the Llama2-7B-Chat model misclassified over 90% of unbiased content as biased, despite achieving high accuracy in identifying bias issues on the BBQ dataset. Additionally, specific evaluation and question settings in bias benchmarks often lead LLMs to choose "evasive answers", disregarding the core of the question and the relevance of the response to the context. Moreover, the apparent success of previous methods may stem from flawed evaluation metrics. Our research highlights a potential "false prosperity" in prompt-base efforts and emphasizes the need to rethink bias metrics to ensure truly trustworthy AI.

Intrinsic Model Weaknesses: How Priming Attacks Unveil Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly influenced various industries but suffer from a critical flaw, the potential sensitivity of generating harmful content, which poses severe societal risks. We developed and tested novel attack strategies on popular LLMs to expose their vulnerabilities in generating inappropriate content. These strategies, inspired by psychological phenomena such as the "Priming Effect", "Safe Attention Shift", and "Cognitive Dissonance", effectively attack the models' guarding mechanisms. Our experiments achieved an attack success rate (ASR) of 100% on various open-source models, including Meta's Llama-3.2, Google's Gemma-2, Mistral's Mistral-NeMo, Falcon's Falcon-mamba, Apple's DCLM, Microsoft's Phi3, and Qwen's Qwen2.5, among others. Similarly, for closed-source models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini-1.5, and Claude-3.5, we observed an ASR of at least 95% on the AdvBench dataset, which represents the current state-of-the-art. This study underscores the urgent need to reassess the use of generative models in critical applications to mitigate potential adverse societal impacts.

LLMCL-GEC: Advancing Grammatical Error Correction with LLM-Driven Curriculum Learning

While large-scale language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in specific natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they may still lack proficiency compared to specialized models in certain domains, such as grammatical error correction (GEC). Drawing inspiration from the concept of curriculum learning, we have delved into refining LLMs into proficient GEC experts by devising effective curriculum learning (CL) strategies. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, termed LLM-based curriculum learning, which capitalizes on the robust semantic comprehension and discriminative prowess inherent in LLMs to gauge the complexity of GEC training data. Unlike traditional curriculum learning techniques, our method closely mirrors human expert-designed curriculums. Leveraging the proposed LLM-based CL method, we sequentially select varying levels of curriculums ranging from easy to hard, and iteratively train and refine using the pretrianed T5 and LLaMA series models. Through rigorous testing and analysis across diverse benchmark assessments in English GEC, including the CoNLL14 test, BEA19 test, and BEA19 development sets, our approach showcases a significant performance boost over baseline models and conventional curriculum learning methodologies.

DetectRL: Benchmarking LLM-Generated Text Detection in Real-World Scenarios

Detecting text generated by large language models (LLMs) is of great recent interest. With zero-shot methods like DetectGPT, detection capabilities have reached impressive levels. However, the reliability of existing detectors in real-world applications remains underexplored. In this study, we present a new benchmark, DetectRL, highlighting that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection techniques still underperformed in this task. We collected human-written datasets from domains where LLMs are particularly prone to misuse. Using popular LLMs, we generated data that better aligns with real-world applications. Unlike previous studies, we employed heuristic rules to create adversarial LLM-generated text, simulating advanced prompt usages, human revisions like word substitutions, and writing errors. Our development of DetectRL reveals the strengths and limitations of current SOTA detectors. More importantly, we analyzed the potential impact of writing styles, model types, attack methods, the text lengths, and real-world human writing factors on different types of detectors. We believe DetectRL could serve as an effective benchmark for assessing detectors in real-world scenarios, evolving with advanced attack methods, thus providing more stressful evaluation to drive the development of more efficient detectors. Data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/DetectRL.

VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning

Although previous research on large language models (LLMs) and large multi-modal models (LMMs) has systematically explored mathematical problem-solving (MPS) within visual contexts, the analysis of how these models process visual information during problem-solving remains insufficient. To address this gap, we present VisAidMath, a benchmark for evaluating the MPS process related to visual information. We follow a rigorous data curation pipeline involving both automated processes and manual annotations to ensure data quality and reliability. Consequently, this benchmark includes 1,200 challenging problems from various mathematical branches, vision-aid formulations, and difficulty levels, collected from diverse sources such as textbooks, examination papers, and Olympiad problems. Based on the proposed benchmark, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on ten mainstream LLMs and LMMs, highlighting deficiencies in the visual-aided reasoning process. For example, GPT-4V only achieves 45.33% accuracy in the visual-aided reasoning task, even with a drop of 2 points when provided with golden visual aids. In-depth analysis reveals that the main cause of deficiencies lies in hallucination regarding the implicit visual reasoning process, shedding light on future research directions in the visual-aided MPS process.

FOCUS: Forging Originality through Contrastive Use in Self-Plagiarism for Language Models

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown impressive results in various Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, such as powering chatbots and generating stories. However, an ethical concern arises due to their potential to produce verbatim copies of paragraphs from their training data. This is problematic as PLMs are trained on corpora constructed by human authors. As such, there is a pressing need for research to promote the generation of original content by these models. In this study, we introduce a unique "self-plagiarism" contrastive decoding strategy, aimed at boosting the originality of text produced by PLMs. Our method entails modifying prompts in LLMs to develop an amateur model and a professional model. Specifically, the amateur model is urged to plagiarize using three plagiarism templates we have designed, while the professional model maintains its standard language model status. This strategy employs prompts to stimulate the model's capacity to identify non-original candidate token combinations and subsequently impose penalties. The application of this strategy is integrated prior to the model's final layer, ensuring smooth integration with most existing PLMs (T5, GPT, LLaMA) without necessitating further adjustments. Implementing our strategy, we observe a significant decline in non-original sequences comprised of more than three words in the academic AASC dataset and the story-based ROCStories dataset.

Who Wrote This? The Key to Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection Is GECScore

The efficacy of an large language model (LLM) generated text detector depends substantially on the availability of sizable training data. White-box zero-shot detectors, which require no such data, are nonetheless limited by the accessibility of the source model of the LLM-generated text. In this paper, we propose an simple but effective black-box zero-shot detection approach, predicated on the observation that human-written texts typically contain more grammatical errors than LLM-generated texts. This approach entails computing the Grammar Error Correction Score (GECScore) for the given text to distinguish between human-written and LLM-generated text. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot and supervised methods, achieving an average AUROC of 98.7% and showing strong robustness against paraphrase and adversarial perturbation attacks.

A Two-Stage Prediction-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Multi-Intent NLU

Multi-intent natural language understanding (NLU) presents a formidable challenge due to the model confusion arising from multiple intents within a single utterance. While previous works train the model contrastively to increase the margin between different multi-intent labels, they are less suited to the nuances of multi-intent NLU. They ignore the rich information between the shared intents, which is beneficial to constructing a better embedding space, especially in low-data scenarios. We introduce a two-stage Prediction-Aware Contrastive Learning (PACL) framework for multi-intent NLU to harness this valuable knowledge. Our approach capitalizes on shared intent information by integrating word-level pre-training and prediction-aware contrastive fine-tuning. We construct a pre-training dataset using a word-level data augmentation strategy. Subsequently, our framework dynamically assigns roles to instances during contrastive fine-tuning while introducing a prediction-aware contrastive loss to maximize the impact of contrastive learning. We present experimental results and empirical analysis conducted on three widely used datasets, demonstrating that our method surpasses the performance of three prominent baselines on both low-data and full-data scenarios.

3AM: An Ambiguity-Aware Multi-Modal Machine Translation Dataset

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) is a challenging task that seeks to improve translation quality by incorporating visual information. However, recent studies have indicated that the visual information provided by existing MMT datasets is insufficient, causing models to disregard it and overestimate their capabilities. This issue presents a significant obstacle to the development of MMT research. This paper presents a novel solution to this issue by introducing 3AM, an ambiguity-aware MMT dataset comprising 26,000 parallel sentence pairs in English and Chinese, each with corresponding images. Our dataset is specifically designed to include more ambiguity and a greater variety of both captions and images than other MMT datasets. We utilize a word sense disambiguation model to select ambiguous data from vision-and-language datasets, resulting in a more challenging dataset. We further benchmark several state-of-the-art MMT models on our proposed dataset. Experimental results show that MMT models trained on our dataset exhibit a greater ability to exploit visual information than those trained on other MMT datasets. Our work provides a valuable resource for researchers in the field of multimodal learning and encourages further exploration in this area. The data, code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/MaxyLee/3AM.

Prefix Text as a Yarn: Eliciting Non-English Alignment in Foundation Language Model

While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has been a straightforward approach for tailoring the output of foundation large language model (LLM) to specific preferences, concerns have been raised about the depth of this alignment, with some critiques suggesting it is merely "superficial". We critically examine this hypothesis within the scope of cross-lingual generation tasks, proposing that the effectiveness of SFT may be constrained by its reliance on prior tokens to guide cross-lingual generation. Based on this crucial insight, and in response to the challenges posed by the costly and limited availability of non-English data for SFT, we introduce a novel training-free alignment method named PreTTY, which employs minimal task-related prior tokens to bridge the foundation LLM and the SFT LLM, achieving comparable performance without training. Experiments on machine translation and part-of-speech tagging across eight languages demonstrate the efficacy of PreTTY in cross-lingual settings. Remarkably, by initiating the decoding process with only one or two prior tokens, foundation LLMs can achieve performance comparable to their SFT counterparts. This method presents a cost-effective alternative to SFT and advances the democratization of multilingual LLMs.