pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Prescribed Fire Modeling using Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning for Land Management
Authors: Somya Sharma Chatterjee, Kelly Lindsay, Neel Chatterjee, Rohan Patil, Ilkay Altintas De Callafon, Michael Steinbach, Daniel Giron, Mai H. Nguyen, Vipin Kumar
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Management

In recent years, the increasing threat of devastating wildfires has underscored the need for effective prescribed fire management. Process-based computer simulations have traditionally been employed to plan prescribed fires for wildfire prevention. However, even simplified process models like QUIC-Fire are too compute-intensive to be used for real-time decision-making, especially when weather conditions change rapidly. Traditional ML methods used for fire modeling offer computational speedup but struggle with physically inconsistent predictions, biased predictions due to class imbalance, biased estimates for fire spread metrics (e.g., burned area, rate of spread), and generalizability in out-of-distribution wind conditions. This paper introduces a novel machine learning (ML) framework that enables rapid emulation of prescribed fires while addressing these concerns. By incorporating domain knowledge, the proposed method helps reduce physical inconsistencies in fuel density estimates in data-scarce scenarios. To overcome the majority class bias in predictions, we leverage pre-existing source domain data to augment training data and learn the spread of fire more effectively. Finally, we overcome the problem of biased estimation of fire spread metrics by incorporating a hierarchical modeling structure to capture the interdependence in fuel density and burned area. Notably, improvement in fire metric (e.g., burned area) estimates offered by our framework makes it useful for fire managers, who often rely on these fire metric estimates to make decisions about prescribed burn management. Furthermore, our framework exhibits better generalization capabilities than the other ML-based fire modeling methods across diverse wind conditions and ignition patterns.
On the Safety of Open-Sourced Large Language Models: Does Alignment Really Prevent Them From Being Misused?
Authors: Hangfan Zhang, Zhimeng Guo, Huaisheng Zhu, Bochuan Cao, Lu Lin, Jinyuan Jia, Jinghui Chen, Dinghao Wu
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. However, many existing studies have shown that they could be misused to generate undesired content. In response, before releasing LLMs for public access, model developers usually align those language models through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Consequently, those aligned large language models refuse to generate undesired content when facing potentially harmful/unethical requests. A natural question is "could alignment really prevent those open-sourced large language models from being misused to generate undesired content?''. In this work, we provide a negative answer to this question. In particular, we show those open-sourced, aligned large language models could be easily misguided to generate undesired content without heavy computations or careful prompt designs. Our key idea is to directly manipulate the generation process of open-sourced LLMs to misguide it to generate undesired content including harmful or biased information and even private data. We evaluate our method on 4 open-sourced LLMs accessible publicly and our finding highlights the need for more advanced mitigation strategies for open-sourced LLMs.
Active Learning on Neural Networks through Interactive Generation of Digit Patterns and Visual Representation
Authors: Dong H. Jeong, Jin-Hee Cho, Feng Chen, Audun Josang, Soo-Yeon Ji
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been broadly utilized to analyze various data and solve different domain problems. However, neural networks (NNs) have been considered a black box operation for years because their underlying computation and meaning are hidden. Due to this nature, users often face difficulties in interpreting the underlying mechanism of the NNs and the benefits of using them. In this paper, to improve users' learning and understanding of NNs, an interactive learning system is designed to create digit patterns and recognize them in real time. To help users clearly understand the visual differences of digit patterns (i.e., 0 ~ 9) and their results with an NN, integrating visualization is considered to present all digit patterns in a two-dimensional display space with supporting multiple user interactions. An evaluation with multiple datasets is conducted to determine its usability for active learning. In addition, informal user testing is managed during a summer workshop by asking the workshop participants to use the system.
Iterative Option Discovery for Planning, by Planning
Authors: Kenny Young, Richard S. Sutton
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00

Discovering useful temporal abstractions, in the form of options, is widely thought to be key to applying reinforcement learning and planning to increasingly complex domains. Building on the empirical success of the Expert Iteration approach to policy learning used in AlphaZero, we propose Option Iteration, an analogous approach to option discovery. Rather than learning a single strong policy that is trained to match the search results everywhere, Option Iteration learns a set of option policies trained such that for each state encountered, at least one policy in the set matches the search results for some horizon into the future. Intuitively, this may be significantly easier as it allows the algorithm to hedge its bets compared to learning a single globally strong policy, which may have complex dependencies on the details of the current state. Having learned such a set of locally strong policies, we can use them to guide the search algorithm resulting in a virtuous cycle where better options lead to better search results which allows for training of better options. We demonstrate experimentally that planning using options learned with Option Iteration leads to a significant benefit in challenging planning environments compared to an analogous planning algorithm operating in the space of primitive actions and learning a single rollout policy with Expert Iteration.
Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context
Authors: Ori Yoran, Tomer Wolfson, Ori Ram, Jonathan Berant
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference, Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) hold promise to produce language understanding systems that are are factual, efficient, and up-to-date. An important desideratum of RALMs, is that retrieved information helps model performance when it is relevant, and does not harm performance when it is not. This is particularly important in multi-hop reasoning scenarios, where misuse of irrelevant evidence can lead to cascading errors. However, recent work has shown that retrieval augmentation can sometimes have a negative effect on performance. In this work, we present a thorough analysis on five open-domain question answering benchmarks, characterizing cases when retrieval reduces accuracy. We then propose two methods to mitigate this issue. First, a simple baseline that filters out retrieved passages that do not entail question-answer pairs according to a natural language inference (NLI) model. This is effective in preventing performance reduction, but at a cost of also discarding relevant passages. Thus, we propose a method for automatically generating data to fine-tune the language model to properly leverage retrieved passages, using a mix of relevant and irrelevant contexts at training time. We empirically show that even 1,000 examples suffice to train the model to be robust to irrelevant contexts while maintaining high performance on examples with relevant ones.
SmartPlay: A Benchmark for LLMs as Intelligent Agents
Authors: Yue Wu, Xuan Tang, Tom M. Mitchell, Yuanzhi Li
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Minecraft, Spatial Reasoning

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential toward intelligent agents and next-gen automation, but there currently lacks a systematic benchmark for evaluating LLMs' abilities as agents. We introduce SmartPlay: both a challenging benchmark and a methodology for evaluating LLMs as agents. SmartPlay consists of 6 different games, including Rock-Paper-Scissors, Tower of Hanoi, Minecraft. Each game features a unique setting, providing up to 20 evaluation settings and infinite environment variations. Each game in SmartPlay uniquely challenges a subset of 9 important capabilities of an intelligent LLM agent, including reasoning with object dependencies, planning ahead, spatial reasoning, learning from history, and understanding randomness. The distinction between the set of capabilities each game test allows us to analyze each capability separately. SmartPlay serves not only as a rigorous testing ground for evaluating the overall performance of LLM agents but also as a road-map for identifying gaps in current methodologies. We release our benchmark at github.com/Microsoft/SmartPlay
Algebras of actions in an agent's representations of the world
Authors: Alexander Dean, Eduardo Alonso, Esther Mondragon
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

In this paper, we propose a framework to extract the algebra of the transformations of worlds from the perspective of an agent. As a starting point, we use our framework to reproduce the symmetry-based representations from the symmetry-based disentangled representation learning (SBDRL) formalism proposed by [1]; only the algebra of transformations of worlds that form groups can be described using symmetry-based representations. We then study the algebras of the transformations of worlds with features that occur in simple reinforcement learning scenarios. Using computational methods, that we developed, we extract the algebras of the transformations of these worlds and classify them according to their properties. Finally, we generalise two important results of SBDRL - the equivariance condition and the disentangling definition - from only working with symmetry-based representations to working with representations capturing the transformation properties of worlds with transformations for any algebra. Finally, we combine our generalised equivariance condition and our generalised disentangling definition to show that disentangled sub-algebras can each have their own individual equivariance conditions, which can be treated independently.
Bridging the Gap between Structural and Semantic Similarity in Diverse Planning
Authors: Mustafa F. Abdelwahed, Joan Espasa, Alice Toniolo, Ian P. Gent
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Diverse planning is the problem of finding multiple plans for a given problem specification, which is at the core of many real-world applications. For example, diverse planning is a critical piece for the efficiency of plan recognition systems when dealing with noisy and missing observations. Providing diverse solutions can also benefit situations where constraints are too expensive or impossible to model. Current diverse planners operate by generating multiple plans and then applying a selection procedure to extract diverse solutions using a similarity metric. Generally, current similarity metrics only consider the structural properties of the given plans. We argue that this approach is a limitation that sometimes prevents such metrics from capturing why two plans differ. In this work, we propose two new domain-independent metrics which are able to capture relevant information on the difference between two given plans from a domain-dependent viewpoint. We showcase their utility in various situations where the currently used metrics fail to capture the similarity between plans, failing to capture some structural symmetries.
Towards Automatic Design of Factorio Blueprints
Authors: Sean Patterson, Joan Espasa, Mun See Chang, Ruth Hoffmann
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Factorio is a 2D construction and management simulation video game about building automated factories to produce items of increasing complexity. A core feature of the game is its blueprint system, which allows players to easily save and replicate parts of their designs. Blueprints can reproduce any layout of objects in the game, but are typically used to encapsulate a complex behaviour, such as the production of a non-basic object. Once created, these blueprints are then used as basic building blocks, allowing the player to create a layer of abstraction. The usage of blueprints not only eases the expansion of the factory but also allows the sharing of designs with the game's community. The layout in a blueprint can be optimised using various criteria, such as the total space used or the final production throughput. The design of an optimal blueprint is a hard combinatorial problem, interleaving elements of many well-studied problems such as bin-packing, routing or network design. This work presents a new challenging problem and explores the feasibility of a constraint model to optimise Factorio blueprints, balancing correctness, optimality, and performance.
Towards a Model of Puzznic
Authors: Joan Espasa, Ian P. Gent, Ian Miguel, Peter Nightingale, András Z. Salamon, Mateu Villaret
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: model

We report on progress in modelling and solving Puzznic, a video game requiring the player to plan sequences of moves to clear a grid by matching blocks. We focus here on levels with no moving blocks. We compare a planning approach and three constraint programming approaches on a small set of benchmark instances. The planning approach is at present superior to the constraint programming approaches, but we outline proposals for improving the constraint models.
A Good Snowman is Hard to Plan
Authors: Miquel Bofill, Cristina Borralleras, Joan Espasa, Gerard Martín, Gustavo Patow, Mateu Villaret
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00

In this work we face a challenging puzzle video game: A Good Snowman is Hard to Build. The objective of the game is to build snowmen by moving and stacking snowballs on a discrete grid. For the sake of player engagement with the game, it is interesting to avoid that a player finds a much easier solution than the one the designer expected. Therefore, having tools that are able to certify the optimality of solutions is crucial. Although the game can be stated as a planning problem and can be naturally modelled in PDDL, we show that a direct translation to SAT clearly outperforms off-the-shelf state-of-the-art planners. As we show, this is mainly due to the fact that reachability properties can be easily modelled in SAT, allowing for shorter plans, whereas using axioms to express a reachability derived predicate in PDDL does not result in any significant reduction of solving time with the considered planners. We deal with a set of 51 levels, both original and crafted, solving 43 and with 8 challenging instances still remaining to be solved.
Challenges in Modelling and Solving Plotting with PDDL
Authors: Joan Espasa, Ian Miguel, Peter Nightingale, András Z. Salamon, Mateu Villaret
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00

We study a planning problem based on Plotting, a tile-matching puzzle video game published by Taito in 1989. The objective of this game is to remove a target number of coloured blocks from a grid by sequentially shooting blocks into the grid. Plotting features complex transitions after every shot: various blocks are affected directly, while others can be indirectly affected by gravity. We highlight the challenges of modelling Plotting with PDDL and of solving it with a grounding-based state-of-the-art planner.
LLM Lies: Hallucinations are not Bugs, but Features as Adversarial Examples
Authors: Jia-Yu Yao, Kun-Peng Ning, Zhen-Hui Liu, Mu-Nan Ning, Yu-Yang Liu, Li Yuan
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT-3.5, LLaMA, and PaLM, seem to be knowledgeable and able to adapt to many tasks. However, we still cannot completely trust their answers, since LLMs suffer from \textbf{hallucination}\textemdash fabricating non-existent facts, deceiving users with or without their awareness. However, the reasons for their existence and pervasiveness remain unclear. In this paper, we demonstrate that nonsensical prompts composed of random tokens can also elicit the LLMs to respond with hallucinations. Moreover, we provide both theoretical and experimental evidence that transformers can be manipulated to produce specific pre-define tokens by perturbing its input sequence. This phenomenon forces us to revisit that \emph{hallucination may be another view of adversarial examples}, and it shares similar characteristics with conventional adversarial examples as a basic property of LLMs. Therefore, we formalize an automatic hallucination triggering method as the \textit{hallucination attack} in an adversarial way. Finally, we explore the basic properties of attacked adversarial prompts and propose a simple yet effective defense strategy. Our code is released on GitHub\footnote{https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Hallucination-Attack}.
Probing the Multi-turn Planning Capabilities of LLMs via 20 Question Games
Authors: Yizhe Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Navdeep Jaitly
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are effective at answering questions that are clearly asked. However, when faced with ambiguous queries they can act unpredictably and produce incorrect outputs. This underscores the need for the development of intelligent agents capable of asking clarification questions to resolve ambiguities effectively. This capability requires complex understanding, state tracking, reasoning and planning over multiple conversational turns. However, directly measuring this can be challenging. In this paper, we offer a surrogate problem which assesses an LLMs's capability to deduce an entity unknown to itself, but revealed to a judge, by asking the judge a series of queries. This \textit{entity-deducing game} can serve as an evaluation framework to probe the conversational reasoning and planning capabilities of language models. We systematically evaluate various LLMs and discover significant differences in their performance on this task. We find that strong LLMs like GPT-4 outperform human players by a large margin. We further employ Behavior Cloning (BC) to examine whether a weaker model is capable of imitating a stronger model and generalizing to data or domains, using only the demonstrations from a stronger model. We finally propose to use Reinforcement Learning to enhance reasoning and planning capacity of Vicuna models through episodes of game playing, which lead to significant performance improvement. We hope that this problem offers insights into how autonomous agents could be trained to behave more intelligently in ambiguous circumstances.
L2MAC: Large Language Model Automatic Computer for Extensive Code Generation
Authors: Samuel Holt, Max Ruiz Luyten, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) are constrained by the fixed context window of the underlying transformer architecture, hindering their ability to produce long and coherent outputs. Memory-augmented LLMs are a promising solution, but current approaches cannot handle long output generation tasks since they (1) only focus on reading memory and reduce its evolution to the concatenation of new memories or (2) use very specialized memories that cannot adapt to other domains. This paper presents L2MAC, the first practical LLM-based general-purpose stored-program automatic computer (von Neumann architecture) framework, an LLM-based multi-agent system, for long and consistent output generation. Its memory has two components: the instruction registry, which is populated with a prompt program to solve the user-given task, and a file store, which will contain the final and intermediate outputs. Each instruction in turn is executed by a separate LLM agent, whose context is managed by a control unit capable of precise memory reading and writing to ensure effective interaction with the file store. These components enable L2MAC to generate extensive outputs, bypassing the constraints of the finite context window while producing outputs that fulfill a complex user-specified task. We empirically demonstrate that L2MAC achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating large codebases for system design tasks, significantly outperforming other coding methods in implementing the detailed user-specified task; we show that L2MAC works for general-purpose extensive text-based tasks, such as writing an entire book; and we provide valuable insights into L2MAC's performance improvement over existing methods.
FedBPT: Efficient Federated Black-box Prompt Tuning for Large Language Models
Authors: Jingwei Sun, Ziyue Xu, Hongxu Yin, Dong Yang, Daguang Xu, Yiran Chen, Holger R. Roth
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have revolutionized the NLP landscape, achieving stellar performances across diverse tasks. These models, while benefiting from vast training data, often require fine-tuning on specific data to cater to distinct downstream tasks. However, this data adaptation process has inherent security and privacy concerns, primarily when leveraging user-generated, device-residing data. Federated learning (FL) provides a solution, allowing collaborative model fine-tuning without centralized data collection. However, applying FL to finetune PLMs is hampered by challenges, including restricted model parameter access, high computational requirements, and communication overheads. This paper introduces Federated Black-box Prompt Tuning (FedBPT), a framework designed to address these challenges. FedBPT does not require the clients to access the model parameters. By focusing on training optimal prompts and utilizing gradient-free optimization methods, FedBPT reduces the number of exchanged variables, boosts communication efficiency, and minimizes computational and storage costs. Experiments highlight the framework's ability to drastically cut communication and memory costs while maintaining competitive performance. Ultimately, FedBPT presents a promising solution for efficient, privacy-preserving fine-tuning of PLM in the age of large language models.
NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding
Authors: Runcong Zhao, Wenjia Zhang, Jiazheng Li, Lixing Zhu, Yanran Li, Yulan He, Lin Gui
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events extracted from narratives from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or improve their favorability with the narrative characters through conversations.