OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Proving membership in LLM pretraining data via data watermarks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Detecting whether copyright holders' works were used in LLM pretraining is poised to be an important problem. This work proposes using data watermarks to enable principled detection with only black-box model access, provided that the rightholder contributed multiple training documents and watermarked them before public release. By applying a randomly sampled data watermark, detection can be framed as hypothesis testing, which provides guarantees on the false detection rate. We study two watermarks: one that inserts random sequences, and another that randomly substitutes characters with Unicode lookalikes. We first show how three aspects of watermark design -- watermark length, number of duplications, and interference -- affect the power of the hypothesis test. Next, we study how a watermark's detection strength changes under model and dataset scaling: while increasing the dataset size decreases the strength of the watermark, watermarks remain strong if the model size also increases. Finally, we view SHA hashes as natural watermarks and show that we can robustly detect hashes from BLOOM-176B's training data, as long as they occurred at least 90 times. Together, our results point towards a promising future for data watermarks in real world use.
Measuring and Controlling Instruction (In)Stability in Language Model Dialogs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

System-prompting is a standard tool for customizing language-model chatbots, enabling them to follow a specific instruction. An implicit assumption in the use of system prompts is that they will be stable, so the chatbot will continue to generate text according to the stipulated instructions for the duration of a conversation. We propose a quantitative benchmark to test this assumption, evaluating instruction stability via self-chats between two instructed chatbots. Testing popular models like LLaMA2-chat-70B and GPT-3.5, we reveal a significant instruction drift within eight rounds of conversations. An empirical and theoretical analysis of this phenomenon suggests the transformer attention mechanism plays a role, due to attention decay over long exchanges. To combat attention decay and instruction drift, we propose a lightweight method called split-softmax, which compares favorably against two strong baselines.
Optimal feature rescaling in machine learning based on neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a novel approach to improve the training efficiency and the generalization performance of Feed Forward Neural Networks (FFNNs) resorting to an optimal rescaling of input features (OFR) carried out by a Genetic Algorithm (GA). The OFR reshapes the input space improving the conditioning of the gradient-based algorithm used for the training. Moreover, the scale factors exploration entailed by GA trials and selection corresponds to different initialization of the first layer weights at each training attempt, thus realizing a multi-start global search algorithm (even though restrained to few weights only) which fosters the achievement of a global minimum. The approach has been tested on a FFNN modeling the outcome of a real industrial process (centerless grinding).
Thermal Infrared Imaging to Evaluate Emotional Competences in Nursing Students: A First Approach through a Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

During nursing studies, it is crucial to develop emotional skills for both academic success and quality patient care. Utilizing technologies like thermography can be instrumental in nursing education to assess and enhance these skills. The study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of thermography in monitoring and improving the emotional skills of nursing students through a case study approach. The case study involved exposing a student to various emotional stimuli, including videos and music, and measuring facial temperature changes. These changes were recorded using a FLIR E6 camera across three phases: acclimatization, stimulus, and response. Environmental factors such as temperature and humidity were also recorded. Distinct thermal responses were observed for different emotions. For instance, during the acclimatization phase with video stimuli, forehead temperatures varied between positive emotions (joy: 34.5\textdegree C to 34.5\textdegree C) and negative emotions (anger: 36.1\textdegree C to 35.1\textdegree C). However, there was a uniform change in temperature during both stimulus (joy: 34.7\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C, anger: 35.0\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C) and response phases (joy: 35.0\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C, anger: 34.8\textdegree C to 35.0\textdegree C). Music stimuli also induced varying thermal patterns (joy: 34.2\textdegree C to 33.9\textdegree C to 33.4\textdegree C, anger: 33.8\textdegree C to 33.4\textdegree C to 33.8\textdegree C).Thermography revealed consistent thermal patterns in response to emotional stimuli, with the exception of the nose area, suggesting its suitability as a non-invasive, quantifiable, and accessible method for emotional skill training in nursing education.
Quantum-Inspired Analysis of Neural Network Vulnerabilities: The Role of Conjugate Variables in System Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks demonstrate inherent vulnerability to small, non-random perturbations, emerging as adversarial attacks. Such attacks, born from the gradient of the loss function relative to the input, are discerned as input conjugates, revealing a systemic fragility within the network structure. Intriguingly, a mathematical congruence manifests between this mechanism and the quantum physics' uncertainty principle, casting light on a hitherto unanticipated interdisciplinarity. This inherent susceptibility within neural network systems is generally intrinsic, highlighting not only the innate vulnerability of these networks but also suggesting potential advancements in the interdisciplinary area for understanding these black-box networks.
WilKE: Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor for Lifelong Knowledge Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge editing aims to rectify inaccuracies in large language models (LLMs) without costly retraining for outdated or erroneous knowledge. However, current knowledge editing methods primarily focus on single editing, failing to meet the requirements for lifelong editing. This study reveals a performance degradation encountered by knowledge editing in lifelong editing, characterized by toxicity buildup and toxicity flash, with the primary cause identified as pattern unmatch. We introduce a knowledge editing approach named Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor (WilKE), which selects editing layer based on the pattern matching degree of editing knowledge across different layers in language models. Experimental results demonstrate that, in lifelong editing, WilKE exhibits an average improvement of 46.2% and 67.8% on editing GPT2-XL and GPT-J relative to state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods.
idwMapper: An interactive and data-driven web mapping framework for visualizing and sensing high-dimensional geospatial (big) data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

We are surrounded by overwhelming big data, which brings substantial advances but meanwhile poses many challenges. Geospatial big data comprises a big portion of big data, and is essential and powerful for decision-making if being utilized strategically. Volumes in size and high dimensions are two of the major challenges that prevent strategic decision-making from (geospatial) big data. Interactive map-based and geovisualization enabled web applications are intuitive and useful to construct knowledge and reveal insights from high-dimensional (geospatial) big data for actionable decision-making. We propose an interactive and data-driven web mapping framework, named idwMapper, for visualizing and sensing high dimensional geospatial (big) data in an interactive and scalable manner. To demonstrate the wide applicability and usefulness of our framework, we have applied our idwMapper framework to three real-world case studies and implemented three corresponding web map applications: iLit4GEE-AI, iWURanking, and iTRELISmap. We expect and hope the three web maps demonstrated in different domains, from literature big data analysis through world university ranking to scholar mapping, will provide a good start and inspire researchers and practitioners in various domains to apply our idwMapper to solve (or at least aid them in solving) their impactful problems.
Dense Passage Retrieval: Is it Retrieving?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Dense passage retrieval (DPR) is the first step in the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLM). DPR fine-tunes pre-trained networks to enhance the alignment of the embeddings between queries and relevant textual data. A deeper understanding of DPR fine-tuning will be required to fundamentally unlock the full potential of this approach. In this work, we explore DPR-trained models mechanistically by using a combination of probing, layer activation analysis, and model editing. Our experiments show that DPR training decentralizes how knowledge is stored in the network, creating multiple access pathways to the same information. We also uncover a limitation in this training style: the internal knowledge of the pre-trained model bounds what the retrieval model can retrieve. These findings suggest a few possible directions for dense retrieval: (1) expose the DPR training process to more knowledge so more can be decentralized, (2) inject facts as decentralized representations, (3) model and incorporate knowledge uncertainty in the retrieval process, and (4) directly map internal model knowledge to a knowledge base.
Towards identifying and minimizing customer-facing documentation debt
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software documentation often struggles to catch up with the pace of software evolution. The lack of correct, complete, and up-to-date documentation results in an increasing number of documentation defects which could introduce delays in integrating software systems. In our previous study on a bug analysis tool called MultiDimEr, we provided evidence that documentation-related defects contribute to many bug reports. First, we want to identify documentation defect types contributing to documentation defects, thereby identifying documentation debt. Secondly, we aim to find pragmatic solutions to minimize most common documentation defects to pay off the documentation debt in the long run. We investigated documentation defects related to an industrial software system. First, we looked at different documentation types and associated bug reports. We categorized the defects according to an existing documentation defect taxonomy. Based on a sample of 101 defects, we found that most defects are caused by documentation defects falling into the Information Content (What) category (86). Within this category, the documentation defect types Erroneous code examples (23), Missing documentation (35), and Outdated content (19) contributed to most of the documentation defects. We propose to adapt two solutions to mitigate these types of documentation defects. In practice, documentation debt can easily go undetected since a large share of resources and focus is dedicated to delivering high-quality software. We suggest adapting two main solutions to tackle documentation debt by implementing (i) Dynamic Documentation Generation (DDG) and/or (ii) Automated Documentation Testing (ADT), which are both based on defining a single and robust information source for documentation.
AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the rise of generative AI, automated fact-checking methods to combat misinformation are becoming more and more important. However, factual claim detection, the first step in a fact-checking pipeline, suffers from two key issues that limit its scalability and generalizability: (1) inconsistency in definitions of the task and what a claim is, and (2) the high cost of manual annotation. To address (1), we review the definitions in related work and propose a unifying definition of factual claims that focuses on verifiability. To address (2), we introduce AFaCTA (Automatic Factual Claim deTection Annotator), a novel framework that assists in the annotation of factual claims with the help of large language models (LLMs). AFaCTA calibrates its annotation confidence with consistency along three predefined reasoning paths. Extensive evaluation and experiments in the domain of political speech reveal that AFaCTA can efficiently assist experts in annotating factual claims and training high-quality classifiers, and can work with or without expert supervision. Our analyses also result in PoliClaim, a comprehensive claim detection dataset spanning diverse political topics.
Implicit Causal Representation Learning via Switchable Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Learning causal representations from observational and interventional data in the absence of known ground-truth graph structures necessitates implicit latent causal representation learning. Implicit learning of causal mechanisms typically involves two categories of interventional data: hard and soft interventions. In real-world scenarios, soft interventions are often more realistic than hard interventions, as the latter require fully controlled environments. Unlike hard interventions, which directly force changes in a causal variable, soft interventions exert influence indirectly by affecting the causal mechanism. However, the subtlety of soft interventions impose several challenges for learning causal models. One challenge is that soft intervention's effects are ambiguous, since parental relations remain intact. In this paper, we tackle the challenges of learning causal models using soft interventions while retaining implicit modelling. We propose ICLR-SM, which models the effects of soft interventions by employing a causal mechanism switch variable designed to toggle between different causal mechanisms. In our experiments, we consistently observe improved learning of identifiable, causal representations, compared to baseline approaches.
Supporting Experts with a Multimodal Machine-Learning-Based Tool for Human Behavior Analysis of Conversational Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal scene search of conversations is essential for unlocking valuable insights into social dynamics and enhancing our communication. While experts in conversational analysis have their own knowledge and skills to find key scenes, a lack of comprehensive, user-friendly tools that streamline the processing of diverse multimodal queries impedes efficiency and objectivity. To solve it, we developed Providence, a visual-programming-based tool based on design considerations derived from a formative study with experts. It enables experts to combine various machine learning algorithms to capture human behavioral cues without writing code. Our study showed its preferable usability and satisfactory output with less cognitive load imposed in accomplishing scene search tasks of conversations, verifying the importance of its customizability and transparency. Furthermore, through the in-the-wild trial, we confirmed the objectivity and reusability of the tool transform experts' workflow, suggesting the advantage of expert-AI teaming in a highly human-contextual domain.
Beyond Generalization: A Survey of Out-Of-Distribution Adaptation on Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Distribution shifts on graphs -- the data distribution discrepancies between training and testing a graph machine learning model, are often ubiquitous and unavoidable in real-world scenarios. Such shifts may severely deteriorate the performance of the model, posing significant challenges for reliable graph machine learning. Consequently, there has been a surge in research on graph Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) adaptation methods that aim to mitigate the distribution shifts and adapt the knowledge from one distribution to another. In our survey, we provide an up-to-date and forward-looking review of graph OOD adaptation methods, covering two main problem scenarios including training-time as well as test-time graph OOD adaptation. We start by formally formulating the two problems and then discuss different types of distribution shifts on graphs. Based on our proposed taxonomy for graph OOD adaptation, we systematically categorize the existing methods according to their learning paradigm and investigate the techniques behind them. Finally, we point out promising research directions and the corresponding challenges. We also provide a continuously updated reading list at https://github.com/kaize0409/Awesome-Graph-OOD-Adaptation.git
ToBlend: Token-Level Blending With an Ensemble of LLMs to Attack AI-Generated Text Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The robustness of AI-content detection models against sophisticated adversarial strategies, such as paraphrasing or word switching, is a rising concern in natural language generation (NLG) applications. This study proposes ToBlend, a novel token-level ensemble text generation method to challenge the robustness of current AI-content detection approaches by utilizing multiple sets of candidate generative large language models (LLMs). By randomly sampling token(s) from candidate LLMs sets, we find ToBlend significantly drops the performance of most mainstream AI-content detection methods. We evaluate the text quality produced under different ToBlend settings based on annotations from experienced human experts. We proposed a fine-tuned Llama3.1 model to distinguish the ToBlend generated text more accurately. Our findings underscore our proposed text generation approach's great potential in deceiving and improving detection models. Our datasets, codes, and annotations are open-sourced.
RENOVI: A Benchmark Towards Remediating Norm Violations in Socio-Cultural Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Norm violations occur when individuals fail to conform to culturally accepted behaviors, which may lead to potential conflicts. Remediating norm violations requires social awareness and cultural sensitivity of the nuances at play. To equip interactive AI systems with a remediation ability, we offer ReNoVi - a large-scale corpus of 9,258 multi-turn dialogues annotated with social norms, as well as define a sequence of tasks to help understand and remediate norm violations step by step. ReNoVi consists of two parts: 512 human-authored dialogues (real data), and 8,746 synthetic conversations generated by ChatGPT through prompt learning. While collecting sufficient human-authored data is costly, synthetic conversations provide suitable amounts of data to help mitigate the scarcity of training data, as well as the chance to assess the alignment between LLMs and humans in the awareness of social norms. We thus harness the power of ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data for our task. To ensure the quality of both human-authored and synthetic data, we follow a quality control protocol during data collection. Our experimental results demonstrate the importance of remediating norm violations in socio-cultural conversations, as well as the improvement in performance obtained from synthetic data.
Minimally Supervised Topological Projections of Self-Organizing Maps for Phase of Flight Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Identifying phases of flight is important in the field of general aviation, as knowing which phase of flight data is collected from aircraft flight data recorders can aid in the more effective detection of safety or hazardous events. General aviation flight data for phase of flight identification is usually per-second data, comes on a large scale, and is class imbalanced. It is expensive to manually label the data and training classification models usually faces class imbalance problems. This work investigates the use of a novel method for minimally supervised self-organizing maps (MS-SOMs) which utilize nearest neighbor majority votes in the SOM U-matrix for class estimation. Results show that the proposed method can reach or exceed a naive SOM approach which utilized a full data file of labeled data, with only 30 labeled datapoints per class. Additionally, the minimally supervised SOM is significantly more robust to the class imbalance of the phase of flight data. These results highlight how little data is required for effective phase of flight identification.
Direct Evaluation of Chain-of-Thought in Multi-hop Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities when prompted to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations alongside answers. However, previous research on evaluating LLMs has solely focused on answer accuracy, neglecting the correctness of the generated CoT. In this paper, we delve deeper into the CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop question answering by utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs). We propose a novel discriminative and generative CoT evaluation paradigm to assess LLMs' knowledge of reasoning and the accuracy of the generated CoT. Through experiments conducted on 5 different families of LLMs across 2 multi-hop question-answering datasets, we find that LLMs possess sufficient knowledge to perform reasoning. However, there exists a significant disparity between answer accuracy and faithfulness of the CoT reasoning generated by LLMs, indicating that they often arrive at correct answers through incorrect reasoning.
Exploring ChatGPT for Next-generation Information Retrieval: Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has highlighted ChatGPT as a pivotal technology in the field of information retrieval (IR). Distinguished from its predecessors, ChatGPT offers significant benefits that have attracted the attention of both the industry and academic communities. While some view ChatGPT as a groundbreaking innovation, others attribute its success to the effective integration of product development and market strategies. The emergence of ChatGPT, alongside GPT-4, marks a new phase in Generative AI, generating content that is distinct from training examples and exceeding the capabilities of the prior GPT-3 model by OpenAI. Unlike the traditional supervised learning approach in IR tasks, ChatGPT challenges existing paradigms, bringing forth new challenges and opportunities regarding text quality assurance, model bias, and efficiency. This paper seeks to examine the impact of ChatGPT on IR tasks and offer insights into its potential future developments.
On the Role of Similarity in Detecting Masquerading Files
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Similarity has been applied to a wide range of security applications, typically used in machine learning models. We examine the problem posed by masquerading samples; that is samples crafted by bad actors to be similar or near identical to legitimate samples. We find that these samples potentially create significant problems for machine learning solutions. The primary problem being that bad actors can circumvent machine learning solutions by using masquerading samples. We then examine the interplay between digital signatures and machine learning solutions. In particular, we focus on executable files and code signing. We offer a taxonomy for masquerading files. We use a combination of similarity and clustering to find masquerading files. We use the insights gathered in this process to offer improvements to similarity based and machine learning security solutions.