Arabic Dataset for LLM Safeguard Evaluation

The growing use of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns regarding their safety. While many studies have focused on English, the safety of LLMs in Arabic, with its linguistic and cultural complexities, remains under-explored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we present an Arab-region-specific safety evaluation dataset consisting of 5,799 questions, including direct attacks, indirect attacks, and harmless requests with sensitive words, adapted to reflect the socio-cultural context of the Arab world. To uncover the impact of different stances in handling sensitive and controversial topics, we propose a dual-perspective evaluation framework. It assesses the LLM responses from both governmental and opposition viewpoints. Experiments over five leading Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs reveal substantial disparities in their safety performance. This reinforces the need for culturally specific datasets to ensure the responsible deployment of LLMs.

ToolGen: Unified Tool Retrieval and Calling via Generation

As large language models (LLMs) advance, their inability to autonomously execute tasks by directly interacting with external tools remains a critical limitation. Traditional methods rely on inputting tool descriptions as context, which is constrained by context length and requires separate, often inefficient, retrieval mechanisms. We introduce ToolGen, a paradigm shift that integrates tool knowledge directly into the LLM's parameters by representing each tool as a unique token. This enables the LLM to generate tool calls and arguments as part of its next token prediction capabilities, seamlessly blending tool invocation with language generation. Our framework allows the LLM to access and utilize a vast amount of tools with no additional retrieval step, significantly enhancing both performance and scalability. Experimental results with over 47,000 tools show that ToolGen not only achieves superior results in both tool retrieval and autonomous task completion but also sets the stage for a new era of AI agents that can adapt to tools across diverse domains. By fundamentally transforming tool retrieval into a generative process, ToolGen paves the way for more versatile, efficient, and autonomous AI systems. ToolGen enables end-to-end tool learning and opens opportunities for integration with other advanced techniques such as chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning, thereby expanding the practical capabilities of LLMs.

Loki: An Open-Source Tool for Fact Verification

We introduce Loki, an open-source tool designed to address the growing problem of misinformation. Loki adopts a human-centered approach, striking a balance between the quality of fact-checking and the cost of human involvement. It decomposes the fact-checking task into a five-step pipeline: breaking down long texts into individual claims, assessing their check-worthiness, generating queries, retrieving evidence, and verifying the claims. Instead of fully automating the claim verification process, Loki provides essential information at each step to assist human judgment, especially for general users such as journalists and content moderators. Moreover, it has been optimized for latency, robustness, and cost efficiency at a commercially usable level. Loki is released under an MIT license and is available on GitHub. We also provide a video presenting the system and its capabilities.

Unconditional Truthfulness: Learning Conditional Dependency for Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a perspective approach to detecting Large Language Model (LLM) hallucinations and low quality output. In this work, we address one of the challenges of UQ in generation tasks that arises from the conditional dependency between the generation steps of an LLM. We propose to learn this dependency from data. We train a regression model, which target variable is the gap between the conditional and the unconditional generation confidence. During LLM inference, we use this learned conditional dependency model to modulate the uncertainty of the current generation step based on the uncertainty of the previous step. Our experimental evaluation on nine datasets and three LLMs shows that the proposed method is highly effective for uncertainty quantification, achieving substantial improvements over rivaling approaches.

To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate. That is the Question: A Case Study on Annotation Subjectivity in Span Prediction

This paper explores the task of automatic prediction of text spans in a legal problem description that support a legal area label. We use a corpus of problem descriptions written by laypeople in English that is annotated by practising lawyers. Inherent subjectivity exists in our task because legal area categorisation is a complex task, and lawyers often have different views on a problem, especially in the face of legally-imprecise descriptions of issues. Experiments show that training on majority-voted spans outperforms training on disaggregated ones.

Inference-Time Selective Debiasing

We propose selective debiasing -- an inference-time safety mechanism that aims to increase the overall quality of models in terms of prediction performance and fairness in the situation when re-training a model is prohibitive. The method is inspired by selective prediction, where some predictions that are considered low quality are discarded at inference time. In our approach, we identify the potentially biased model predictions and, instead of discarding them, we debias them using LEACE -- a post-processing debiasing method. To select problematic predictions, we propose a bias quantification approach based on KL divergence, which achieves better results than standard UQ methods. Experiments with text classification datasets demonstrate that selective debiasing helps to close the performance gap between post-processing methods and at-training and pre-processing debiasing techniques.

Web2Code: A Large-scale Webpage-to-Code Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive success across modalities such as image, video, and audio in a variety of understanding and generation tasks. However, current MLLMs are surprisingly poor at understanding webpage screenshots and generating their corresponding HTML code. To address this problem, we propose Web2Code, a benchmark consisting of a new large-scale webpage-to-code dataset for instruction tuning and an evaluation framework for the webpage understanding and HTML code translation abilities of MLLMs. For dataset construction, we leverage pretrained LLMs to enhance existing webpage-to-code datasets as well as generate a diverse pool of new webpages rendered into images. Specifically, the inputs are webpage images and instructions, while the responses are the webpage's HTML code. We further include diverse natural language QA pairs about the webpage content in the responses to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the web content. To evaluate model performance in these tasks, we develop an evaluation framework for testing MLLMs' abilities in webpage understanding and web-to-code generation. Extensive experiments show that our proposed dataset is beneficial not only to our proposed tasks but also in the general visual domain, while previous datasets result in worse performance. We hope our work will contribute to the development of general MLLMs suitable for web-based content generation and task automation. Our data and code will be available at https://github.com/MBZUAI-LLM/web2code.

Benchmarking Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Large Language Models with LM-Polygraph

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is becoming increasingly recognized as a critical component of applications that rely on machine learning (ML). The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has stimulated researchers to seek efficient and effective approaches to UQ in text generation tasks, as in addition to their emerging capabilities, these models have introduced new challenges for building safe applications. As with other ML models, LLMs are prone to make incorrect predictions, ``hallucinate'' by fabricating claims, or simply generate low-quality output for a given input. UQ is a key element in dealing with these challenges. However research to date on UQ methods for LLMs has been fragmented, with disparate evaluation methods. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing a novel benchmark that implements a collection of state-of-the-art UQ baselines, and provides an environment for controllable and consistent evaluation of novel techniques by researchers in various text generation tasks. Our benchmark also supports the assessment of confidence normalization methods in terms of their ability to provide interpretable scores. Using our benchmark, we conduct a large-scale empirical investigation of UQ and normalization techniques across nine tasks and shed light on the most promising approaches.

Evaluating Transparency of Machine Generated Fact Checking Explanations

An important factor when it comes to generating fact-checking explanations is the selection of evidence: intuitively, high-quality explanations can only be generated given the right evidence. In this work, we investigate the impact of human-curated vs. machine-selected evidence for explanation generation using large language models. To assess the quality of explanations, we focus on transparency (whether an explanation cites sources properly) and utility (whether an explanation is helpful in clarifying a claim). Surprisingly, we found that large language models generate similar or higher quality explanations using machine-selected evidence, suggesting carefully curated evidence (by humans) may not be necessary. That said, even with the best model, the generated explanations are not always faithful to the sources, suggesting further room for improvement in explanation generation for fact-checking.

Revisiting subword tokenization: A case study on affixal negation in large language models

In this work, we measure the impact of affixal negation on modern English large language models (LLMs). In affixal negation, the negated meaning is expressed through a negative morpheme, which is potentially challenging for LLMs as their tokenizers are often not morphologically plausible. We conduct extensive experiments using LLMs with different subword tokenization methods, which lead to several insights on the interaction between tokenization performance and negation sensitivity. Despite some interesting mismatches between tokenization accuracy and negation detection performance, we show that models can, on the whole, reliably recognize the meaning of affixal negation.