Meta-Reasoning Improves Tool Use in Large Language Models

External tools help large language models (LLMs) succeed at tasks where they would otherwise typically fail. In existing frameworks, LLMs learn tool use either by in-context demonstrations or via full model fine-tuning on annotated data. As these approaches do not easily scale, a recent trend is to abandon them in favor of lightweight, parameter-efficient tuning paradigms. These methods allow quickly alternating between the frozen LLM and its specialised fine-tuned version, by switching on or off a handful of additional custom parameters. Hence, we postulate that the generalization ability of the frozen model can be leveraged to improve tool selection. We present Tool selECTion via meta-reasONing (TECTON), a two-phase system that first reasons over a task using a custom fine-tuned LM head and outputs candidate tools. Then, with the custom head disabled, it meta-reasons (i.e., it reasons over the previous reasoning process) to make a final choice. We show that TECTON results in substantial gains - both in-distribution and out-of-distribution - on a range of math reasoning datasets.

DiffuseDef: Improved Robustness to Adversarial Attacks

Pretrained language models have significantly advanced performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, adversarial attacks continue to pose a critical challenge to system built using these models, as they can be exploited with carefully crafted adversarial texts. Inspired by the ability of diffusion models to predict and reduce noise in computer vision, we propose a novel and flexible adversarial defense method for language classification tasks, DiffuseDef, which incorporates a diffusion layer as a denoiser between the encoder and the classifier. During inference, the adversarial hidden state is first combined with sampled noise, then denoised iteratively and finally ensembled to produce a robust text representation. By integrating adversarial training, denoising, and ensembling techniques, we show that DiffuseDef improves over different existing adversarial defense methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance against common adversarial attacks.

Inherent Challenges of Post-Hoc Membership Inference for Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often trained on vast amounts of undisclosed data, motivating the development of post-hoc Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) to gain insight into their training data composition. However, in this paper, we identify inherent challenges in post-hoc MIA evaluation due to potential distribution shifts between collected member and non-member datasets. Using a simple bag-of-words classifier, we demonstrate that datasets used in recent post-hoc MIAs suffer from significant distribution shifts, in some cases achieving near-perfect distinction between members and non-members. This implies that previously reported high MIA performance may be largely attributable to these shifts rather than model memorization. We confirm that randomized, controlled setups eliminate such shifts and thus enable the development and fair evaluation of new MIAs. However, we note that such randomized setups are rarely available for the latest LLMs, making post-hoc data collection still required to infer membership for real-world LLMs. As a potential solution, we propose a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) approach for post-hoc data collection, which substantially mitigates distribution shifts. Evaluating various MIA methods on this RDD setup yields performance barely above random guessing, in stark contrast to previously reported results. Overall, our findings highlight the challenges in accurately measuring LLM memorization and the need for careful experimental design in (post-hoc) membership inference tasks.

Continuous Predictive Modeling of Clinical Notes and ICD Codes in Patient Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHR) serve as a valuable source of patient information, offering insights into medical histories, treatments, and outcomes. Previous research has developed systems for detecting applicable ICD codes that should be assigned while writing a given EHR document, mainly focusing on discharge summaries written at the end of a hospital stay. In this work, we investigate the potential of predicting these codes for the whole patient stay at different time points during their stay, even before they are officially assigned by clinicians. The development of methods to predict diagnoses and treatments earlier in advance could open opportunities for predictive medicine, such as identifying disease risks sooner, suggesting treatments, and optimizing resource allocation. Our experiments show that predictions regarding final ICD codes can be made already two days after admission and we propose a custom model that improves performance on this early prediction task.

Prompting open-source and commercial language models for grammatical error correction of English learner text

Thanks to recent advances in generative AI, we are able to prompt large language models (LLMs) to produce texts which are fluent and grammatical. In addition, it has been shown that we can elicit attempts at grammatical error correction (GEC) from LLMs when prompted with ungrammatical input sentences. We evaluate how well LLMs can perform at GEC by measuring their performance on established benchmark datasets. We go beyond previous studies, which only examined GPT* models on a selection of English GEC datasets, by evaluating seven open-source and three commercial LLMs on four established GEC benchmarks. We investigate model performance and report results against individual error types. Our results indicate that LLMs do not always outperform supervised English GEC models except in specific contexts -- namely commercial LLMs on benchmarks annotated with fluency corrections as opposed to minimal edits. We find that several open-source models outperform commercial ones on minimal edit benchmarks, and that in some settings zero-shot prompting is just as competitive as few-shot prompting.

Did the Neurons Read your Book? Document-level Membership Inference for Large Language Models

With large language models (LLMs) poised to become embedded in our daily lives, questions are starting to be raised about the dataset(s) they learned from. These questions range from potential bias or misinformation LLMs could retain from their training data to questions of copyright and fair use of human-generated text. However, while these questions emerge, developers of the recent state-of-the-art LLMs become increasingly reluctant to disclose details on their training corpus. We here introduce the task of document-level membership inference for real-world LLMs, i.e. inferring whether the LLM has seen a given document during training or not. First, we propose a procedure for the development and evaluation of document-level membership inference for LLMs by leveraging commonly used data sources for training and the model release date. We then propose a practical, black-box method to predict document-level membership and instantiate it on OpenLLaMA-7B with both books and academic papers. We show our methodology to perform very well, reaching an impressive AUC of 0.856 for books and 0.678 for papers. We then show our approach to outperform the sentence-level membership inference attacks used in the privacy literature for the document-level membership task. We finally evaluate whether smaller models might be less sensitive to document-level inference and show OpenLLaMA-3B to be approximately as sensitive as OpenLLaMA-7B to our approach. Taken together, our results show that accurate document-level membership can be inferred for LLMs, increasing the transparency of technology poised to change our lives.

On the application of Large Language Models for language teaching and assessment technology

The recent release of very large language models such as PaLM and GPT-4 has made an unprecedented impact in the popular media and public consciousness, giving rise to a mixture of excitement and fear as to their capabilities and potential uses, and shining a light on natural language processing research which had not previously received so much attention. The developments offer great promise for education technology, and in this paper we look specifically at the potential for incorporating large language models in AI-driven language teaching and assessment systems. We consider several research areas and also discuss the risks and ethical considerations surrounding generative AI in education technology for language learners. Overall we find that larger language models offer improvements over previous models in text generation, opening up routes toward content generation which had not previously been plausible. For text generation they must be prompted carefully and their outputs may need to be reshaped before they are ready for use. For automated grading and grammatical error correction, tasks whose progress is checked on well-known benchmarks, early investigations indicate that large language models on their own do not improve on state-of-the-art results according to standard evaluation metrics. For grading it appears that linguistic features established in the literature should still be used for best performance, and for error correction it may be that the models can offer alternative feedback styles which are not measured sensitively with existing methods. In all cases, there is work to be done to experiment with the inclusion of large language models in education technology for language learners, in order to properly understand and report on their capacities and limitations, and to ensure that foreseeable risks such as misinformation and harmful bias are mitigated.

Improving Robustness in Knowledge Distillation Using Domain-Targeted Data Augmentation

Applying knowledge distillation encourages a student model to behave more like a teacher model, largely retaining the performance of the teacher model, even though the student model may have substantially fewer parameters. However, while distillation helps student models behave more like teacher models in-distribution, this is not necessarily the case out-of-distribution. To address this, we use a language model to create task-specific unlabeled data that mimics the data in targeted out-of-distribution domains. We use this generated data for knowledge distillation on the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), encouraging the student models to behave more like the teacher models for these examples. Our domain-targeted augmentation is highly effective, and outperforms previous robustness methods when evaluating out-of-distribution performance on MNLI. Surprisingly, this method also improves performance on out-of-distribution domains that the data was not generated for. We additionally introduce Distilled Minority Upsampling (DMU), a method for identifying and upsampling minority examples during the distillation. DMU is complementary to the domain-targeted augmentation, and substantially improves performance on SNLI-hard. Finally, we show out-of-distribution improvements on HANS from both of our methods, despite augmenting the training data with fewer than 5k examples.

Logical Reasoning for Natural Language Inference Using Generated Facts as Atoms

State-of-the-art neural models can now reach human performance levels across various natural language understanding tasks. However, despite this impressive performance, models are known to learn from annotation artefacts at the expense of the underlying task. While interpretability methods can identify influential features for each prediction, there are no guarantees that these features are responsible for the model decisions. Instead, we introduce a model-agnostic logical framework to determine the specific information in an input responsible for each model decision. This method creates interpretable Natural Language Inference (NLI) models that maintain their predictive power. We achieve this by generating facts that decompose complex NLI observations into individual logical atoms. Our model makes predictions for each atom and uses logical rules to decide the class of the observation based on the predictions for each atom. We apply our method to the highly challenging ANLI dataset, where our framework improves the performance of both a DeBERTa-base and BERT baseline. Our method performs best on the most challenging examples, achieving a new state-of-the-art for the ANLI round 3 test set. We outperform every baseline in a reduced-data setting, and despite using no annotations for the generated facts, our model predictions for individual facts align with human expectations.

Finding the Needle in a Haystack: Unsupervised Rationale Extraction from Long Text Classifiers

Long-sequence transformers are designed to improve the representation of longer texts by language models and their performance on downstream document-level tasks. However, not much is understood about the quality of token-level predictions in long-form models. We investigate the performance of such architectures in the context of document classification with unsupervised rationale extraction. We find standard soft attention methods to perform significantly worse when combined with the Longformer language model. We propose a compositional soft attention architecture that applies RoBERTa sentence-wise to extract plausible rationales at the token-level. We find this method to significantly outperform Longformer-driven baselines on sentiment classification datasets, while also exhibiting significantly lower runtimes.