Abstract:With the development of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, both their vast applications and potential vulnerabilities have come to the forefront. While developers have integrated multiple safety mechanisms to mitigate their misuse, a risk remains, particularly when models encounter adversarial inputs. This study unveils an attack mechanism that capitalizes on human conversation strategies to extract harmful information from LLMs. We delineate three pivotal strategies: (i) decomposing malicious questions into seemingly innocent sub-questions; (ii) rewriting overtly malicious questions into more covert, benign-sounding ones; (iii) enhancing the harmfulness of responses by prompting models for illustrative examples. Unlike conventional methods that target explicit malicious responses, our approach delves deeper into the nature of the information provided in responses. Through our experiments conducted on GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, and Llama2, our method has demonstrated a marked efficacy compared to conventional attack methods. In summary, this work introduces a novel attack method that outperforms previous approaches, raising an important question: How to discern whether the ultimate intent in a dialogue is malicious?
Abstract:Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) due to their simplicity and efficiency. However, there are concerns about whether MCQs can truly measure LLM's capabilities, particularly in knowledge-intensive scenarios where long-form generation (LFG) answers are required. The misalignment between the task and the evaluation method demands a thoughtful analysis of MCQ's efficacy, which we undertake in this paper by evaluating nine LLMs on four question-answering (QA) datasets in two languages: Chinese and English. We identify a significant issue: LLMs exhibit an order sensitivity in bilingual MCQs, favoring answers located at specific positions, i.e., the first position. We further quantify the gap between MCQs and long-form generation questions (LFGQs) by comparing their direct outputs, token logits, and embeddings. Our results reveal a relatively low correlation between answers from MCQs and LFGQs for identical questions. Additionally, we propose two methods to quantify the consistency and confidence of LLMs' output, which can be generalized to other QA evaluation benchmarks. Notably, our analysis challenges the idea that the higher the consistency, the greater the accuracy. We also find MCQs to be less reliable than LFGQs in terms of expected calibration error. Finally, the misalignment between MCQs and LFGQs is not only reflected in the evaluation performance but also in the embedding space. Our code and models can be accessed at https://github.com/Meetyou-AI-Lab/Can-MC-Evaluate-LLMs.
Abstract:The recent advances in NLP, have led to a new trend of applying LLMs to real-world scenarios. While the latest LLMs are astonishingly fluent when interacting with humans, they suffer from the misinformation problem by unintentionally generating factually false statements. This can lead to harmful consequences, especially when produced within sensitive contexts, such as healthcare. Yet few previous works have focused on evaluating misinformation in the long-form generation of LLMs, especially for knowledge-intensive topics. Moreover, although LLMs have been shown to perform well in different languages, misinformation evaluation has been mostly conducted in English. To this end, we present a benchmark, CARE-MI, for evaluating LLM misinformation in: 1) a sensitive topic, specifically the maternity and infant care domain; and 2) a language other than English, namely Chinese. Most importantly, we provide an innovative paradigm for building long-form generation evaluation benchmarks that can be transferred to other knowledge-intensive domains and low-resourced languages. Our proposed benchmark fills the gap between the extensive usage of LLMs and the lack of datasets for assessing the misinformation generated by these models. It contains 1,612 expert-checked questions, accompanied with human-selected references. Using our benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments and found that current Chinese LLMs are far from perfect in the topic of maternity and infant care. In an effort to minimize the reliance on human resources for performance evaluation, we offer a judgment model for automatically assessing the long-form output of LLMs using the benchmark questions. Moreover, we compare potential solutions for long-form generation evaluation and provide insights for building more robust and efficient automated metric.