Can Machines Resonate with Humans? Evaluating the Emotional and Empathic Comprehension of LMs

Empathy plays a pivotal role in fostering prosocial behavior, often triggered by the sharing of personal experiences through narratives. However, modeling empathy using NLP approaches remains challenging due to its deep interconnection with human interaction dynamics. Previous approaches, which involve fine-tuning language models (LMs) on human-annotated empathic datasets, have had limited success. In our pursuit of improving empathy understanding in LMs, we propose several strategies, including contrastive learning with masked LMs and supervised fine-tuning with Large Language Models (LLMs). While these methods show improvements over previous methods, the overall results remain unsatisfactory. To better understand this trend, we performed an analysis which reveals a low agreement among annotators. This lack of consensus hinders training and highlights the subjective nature of the task. We also explore the cultural impact on annotations. To study this, we meticulously collected story pairs in Urdu language and find that subjectivity in interpreting empathy among annotators appears to be independent of cultural background. The insights from our systematic exploration of LMs' understanding of empathy suggest that there is considerable room for exploration in both task formulation and modeling.

Exploring the Potential of Multimodal LLM with Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal ASR

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in integrating information across various modalities, yet real-world applications in educational and scientific domains remain challenging. This paper introduces the Multimodal Scientific ASR (MS-ASR) task, which focuses on transcribing scientific conference videos by leveraging visual information from slides to enhance the accuracy of technical terminologies. Realized that traditional metrics like WER fall short in assessing performance accurately, prompting the proposal of severity-aware WER (SWER) that considers the content type and severity of ASR errors. We propose the Scientific Vision Augmented ASR (SciVASR) framework as a baseline method, enabling MLLMs to improve transcript quality through post-editing. Evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including GPT-4o, show a 45% improvement over speech-only baselines, highlighting the importance of multimodal information integration.

OpenFactCheck: A Unified Framework for Factuality Evaluation of LLMs

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. Difficulties lie in assessing the factuality of free-form responses in open domains. Also, different papers use disparate evaluation benchmarks and measurements, which renders them hard to compare and hampers future progress. To mitigate these issues, we propose OpenFactCheck, a unified factuality evaluation framework for LLMs. OpenFactCheck consists of three modules: (i) CUSTCHECKER allows users to easily customize an automatic fact-checker and verify the factual correctness of documents and claims, (ii) LLMEVAL, a unified evaluation framework assesses LLM's factuality ability from various perspectives fairly, and (iii) CHECKEREVAL is an extensible solution for gauging the reliability of automatic fact-checkers' verification results using human-annotated datasets. OpenFactCheck is publicly released at https://github.com/yuxiaw/OpenFactCheck.

SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multidomain, Multimodel and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task featured three subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification task determining whether a text is written by a human or generated by a machine. This subtask has two tracks: a monolingual track focused solely on English texts and a multilingual track. Subtask B is to detect the exact source of a text, discerning whether it is written by a human or generated by a specific LLM. Subtask C aims to identify the changing point within a text, at which the authorship transitions from human to machine. The task attracted a large number of participants: subtask A monolingual (126), subtask A multilingual (59), subtask B (70), and subtask C (30). In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For all subtasks, the best systems used LLMs.

Against The Achilles' Heel: A Survey on Red Teaming for Generative Models

Generative models are rapidly gaining popularity and being integrated into everyday applications, raising concerns over their safety issues as various vulnerabilities are exposed. Faced with the problem, the field of red teaming is experiencing fast-paced growth, which highlights the need for a comprehensive organization covering the entire pipeline and addressing emerging topics for the community. Our extensive survey, which examines over 120 papers, introduces a taxonomy of fine-grained attack strategies grounded in the inherent capabilities of language models. Additionally, we have developed the searcher framework that unifies various automatic red teaming approaches. Moreover, our survey covers novel areas including multimodal attacks and defenses, risks around multilingual models, overkill of harmless queries, and safety of downstream applications. We hope this survey can provide a systematic perspective on the field and unlock new areas of research.

A Chinese Dataset for Evaluating the Safeguards in Large Language Models

Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks when LLMs are deployed. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of the risks posed by LLMs, as well as corresponding prompts that can be used to examine the safety mechanisms of LLMs. However, the focus has been almost exclusively on English, and little has been explored for other languages. Here we aim to bridge this gap. We first introduce a dataset for the safety evaluation of Chinese LLMs, and then extend it to two other scenarios that can be used to better identify false negative and false positive examples in terms of risky prompt rejections. We further present a set of fine-grained safety assessment criteria for each risk type, facilitating both manual annotation and automatic evaluation in terms of LLM response harmfulness. Our experiments on five LLMs show that region-specific risks are the prevalent type of risk, presenting the major issue with all Chinese LLMs we experimented with. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

M4GT-Bench: Evaluation Benchmark for Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought an unprecedented surge in machine-generated text (MGT) across diverse channels. This raises legitimate concerns about its potential misuse and societal implications. The need to identify and differentiate such content from genuine human-generated text is critical in combating disinformation, preserving the integrity of education and scientific fields, and maintaining trust in communication. In this work, we address this problem by introducing a new benchmark involving multilingual, multi-domain and multi-generator for MGT detection -- M4GT-Bench. It is collected for three task formulations: (1) mono-lingual and multi-lingual binary MGT detection; (2) multi-way detection identifies which particular model generates the text; and (3) human-machine mixed text detection, where a word boundary delimiting MGT from human-written content should be determined. Human evaluation for Task 2 shows less than random guess performance, demonstrating the challenges to distinguish unique LLMs. Promising results always occur when training and test data distribute within the same domain or generators.

Factuality of Large Language Models in the Year 2024

Large language models (LLMs), especially when instruction-tuned for chat, have become part of our daily lives, freeing people from the process of searching, extracting, and integrating information from multiple sources by offering a straightforward answer to a variety of questions in a single place. Unfortunately, in many cases, LLM responses are factually incorrect, which limits their applicability in real-world scenarios. As a result, research on evaluating and improving the factuality of LLMs has attracted a lot of research attention recently. In this survey, we critically analyze existing work with the aim to identify the major challenges and their associated causes, pointing out to potential solutions for improving the factuality of LLMs, and analyzing the obstacles to automated factuality evaluation for open-ended text generation. We further offer an outlook on where future research should go.

Understanding the Instruction Mixture for Large Language Model Fine-tuning

While instructions fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) has been proven to enhance performance across various applications, the influence of the instruction dataset mixture on LLMs has not been thoroughly explored. In this study, we classify instructions into three main types: NLP downstream tasks, coding, and general chatting, and investigate their impact on LLMs. Our findings reveal that specific types of instructions are more beneficial for particular uses, while it may cause harms to other aspects, emphasizing the importance of meticulously designing the instruction mixture to maximize model performance. This study sheds light on the instruction mixture and paves the way for future research.

Factcheck-GPT: End-to-End Fine-Grained Document-Level Fact-Checking and Correction of LLM Output

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. In this work, we present a holistic end-to-end solution for annotating the factuality of LLM-generated responses, which encompasses a multi-stage annotation scheme designed to yield detailed labels concerning the verifiability and factual inconsistencies found in LLM outputs. We design and build an annotation tool to speed up the labelling procedure and ease the workload of raters. It allows flexible incorporation of automatic results in any stage, e.g. automatically-retrieved evidence. We further construct an open-domain document-level factuality benchmark in three-level granularity: claim, sentence and document. Preliminary experiments show that FacTool, FactScore and Perplexity.ai are struggling to identify false claims with the best F1=0.53. Annotation tool, benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/Factcheck-GPT.