This study examines ChatGPT-4's capability to replicate linguistic strategies used in political discourse, focusing on its potential for manipulative language generation. As large language models become increasingly popular for text generation, concerns have grown regarding their role in spreading fake news and propaganda. This research compares real political speeches with those generated by ChatGPT, emphasizing presuppositions (a rhetorical device that subtly influences audiences by packaging some content as already known at the moment of utterance, thus swaying opinions without explicit argumentation). Using a corpus-based pragmatic analysis, this study assesses how well ChatGPT can mimic these persuasive strategies. The findings reveal that although ChatGPT-generated texts contain many manipulative presuppositions, key differences emerge in their frequency, form, and function compared with those of politicians. For instance, ChatGPT often relies on change-of-state verbs used in fixed phrases, whereas politicians use presupposition triggers in more varied and creative ways. Such differences, however, are challenging to detect with the naked eye, underscoring the potential risks posed by large language models in political and public discourse.Using a corpus-based pragmatic analysis, this study assesses how well ChatGPT can mimic these persuasive strategies. The findings reveal that although ChatGPT-generated texts contain many manipulative presuppositions, key differences emerge in their frequency, form, and function compared with those of politicians. For instance, ChatGPT often relies on change-of-state verbs used in fixed phrases, whereas politicians use presupposition triggers in more varied and creative ways. Such differences, however, are challenging to detect with the naked eye, underscoring the potential risks posed by large language models in political and public discourse.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, including Argument Summarization (ArgSum), a key subfield of Argument Mining (AM). This paper investigates the integration of state-of-the-art LLMs into ArgSum, including for its evaluation. In particular, we propose a novel prompt-based evaluation scheme, and validate it through a novel human benchmark dataset. Our work makes three main contributions: (i) the integration of LLMs into existing ArgSum frameworks, (ii) the development of a new LLM-based ArgSum system, benchmarked against prior methods, and (iii) the introduction of an advanced LLM-based evaluation scheme. We demonstrate that the use of LLMs substantially improves both the generation and evaluation of argument summaries, achieving state-of-the-art results and advancing the field of ArgSum.
Consistency in the output of language models is critical for their reliability and practical utility. Due to their training objective, language models learn to model the full space of possible continuations, leading to outputs that can vary significantly in style and content, even for similar or repeated inputs. To address this, we propose a novel decoding algorithm that enhances response consistency across different prompts with no degradation in response quality. By incorporating a latent variable into the next-token sampling process based on the Gumbel reparametrisation trick, our method outperforms standard sampling by up to 10% across semantic and stylistic consistency benchmarks. Additionally, our approach integrates seamlessly with existing sampling methods with negligible computational overhead, providing a practical solution for improving the reliability of language model outputs.
Personalized tool utilization is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preference in interaction scenarios with various tools. However, most of the current benchmarks primarily focus on either personalization of text generation or direct tool-utilizing, without considering both. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark ETAPP for evaluating personalized tool invocation, establishing a sandbox environment, and a comprehensive dataset of 800 testing cases covering diverse user profiles. To improve the accuracy of our evaluation, we propose a key-point-based LLM evaluation method, mitigating biases in the LLM-as-a-judge system by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. Additionally, we evaluate the excellent LLMs and provide an in-depth analysis. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of different tool-invoking strategies on LLMs' personalization performance and the effects of fine-tuning in our task. The effectiveness of our preference-setting and key-point-based evaluation method is also validated. Our findings offer insights into improving personalized LLM agents. Our Code is available at https://github.com/hypasd-art/ETAPP.
Despite significant progress in Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP), current approaches predominantly emphasize feature extraction and cross-modal comprehension, with limited attention to generating or transforming visual content. This gap hinders the model's ability to synthesize coherent and novel visual representations from textual prompts, thereby reducing the effectiveness of multi-modal learning. In this work, we propose MedUnifier, a unified VLP framework tailored for medical data. MedUnifier seamlessly integrates text-grounded image generation capabilities with multi-modal learning strategies, including image-text contrastive alignment, image-text matching and image-grounded text generation. Unlike traditional methods that reply on continuous visual representations, our approach employs visual vector quantization, which not only facilitates a more cohesive learning strategy for cross-modal understanding but also enhances multi-modal generation quality by effectively leveraging discrete representations. Our framework's effectiveness is evidenced by the experiments on established benchmarks, including uni-modal tasks (supervised fine-tuning), cross-modal tasks (image-text retrieval and zero-shot image classification), and multi-modal tasks (medical report generation, image synthesis), where it achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. MedUnifier also offers a highly adaptable tool for a wide range of language and vision tasks in healthcare, marking advancement toward the development of a generalizable AI model for medical applications.
We propose a novel family of language models, Latent-Thought Language Models (LTMs), which incorporate explicit latent thought vectors that follow an explicit prior model in latent space. These latent thought vectors guide the autoregressive generation of ground tokens through a Transformer decoder. Training employs a dual-rate optimization process within the classical variational Bayes framework: fast learning of local variational parameters for the posterior distribution of latent vectors, and slow learning of global decoder parameters. Empirical studies reveal that LTMs possess additional scaling dimensions beyond traditional LLMs, yielding a structured design space. Higher sample efficiency can be achieved by increasing training compute per token, with further gains possible by trading model size for more inference steps. Designed based on these scaling properties, LTMs demonstrate superior sample and parameter efficiency compared to conventional autoregressive models and discrete diffusion models. They significantly outperform these counterparts in validation perplexity and zero-shot language modeling. Additionally, LTMs exhibit emergent few-shot in-context reasoning capabilities that scale with model and latent size, and achieve competitive performance in conditional and unconditional text generation.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on various natural language generation tasks. Nonetheless, they suffer from generating negative and harmful contents that are biased against certain demographic groups (e.g., female), raising severe fairness concerns. As remedies, prior works intervened the generation by removing attitude or demographic information, inevitably degrading the generation quality and resulting in notable \textit{fairness-fluency} trade-offs. However, it is still under-explored to what extent the fluency \textit{has to} be affected in order to achieve a desired level of fairness. In this work, we conduct the first formal study from an information-theoretic perspective. We show that previous approaches are excessive for debiasing and propose LIDAO, a general framework to debias a (L)LM at a better fluency provably. We further robustify LIDAO in adversarial scenarios, where a carefully-crafted prompt may stimulate LLMs exhibiting instruction-following abilities to generate texts with fairness issue appears only when the prompt is also taken into account. Experiments on three LMs ranging from 0.7B to 7B parameters demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed text generation through inherently probabilistic context-aware mechanisms, mimicking human natural language. In this paper, we systematically investigate the performance of various LLMs when generating random numbers, considering diverse configurations such as different model architectures, numerical ranges, temperature, and prompt languages. Our results reveal that, despite their stochastic transformers-based architecture, these models often exhibit deterministic responses when prompted for random numerical outputs. In particular, we find significant differences when changing the model, as well as the prompt language, attributing this phenomenon to biases deeply embedded within the training data. Models such as DeepSeek-R1 can shed some light on the internal reasoning process of LLMs, despite arriving to similar results. These biases induce predictable patterns that undermine genuine randomness, as LLMs are nothing but reproducing our own human cognitive biases.
The substantial growth of textual content in diverse domains and platforms has led to a considerable need for Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) techniques that aid in the process of text analysis. The effectiveness of text summarization models has been significantly enhanced in a variety of technical domains because of advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning (DL). Despite this, the process of summarizing textual information continues to be significantly constrained by the intricate writing styles of a variety of texts, which involve a range of technical complexities. Text summarization techniques can be broadly categorized into two main types: abstractive summarization and extractive summarization. Extractive summarization involves directly extracting sentences, phrases, or segments of text from the content without making any changes. On the other hand, abstractive summarization is achieved by reconstructing the sentences, phrases, or segments from the original text using linguistic analysis. Through this study, a linguistically diverse categorizations of text summarization approaches have been addressed in a constructive manner. In this paper, the authors explored existing hybrid techniques that have employed both extractive and abstractive methodologies. In addition, the pros and cons of various approaches discussed in the literature are also investigated. Furthermore, the authors conducted a comparative analysis on different techniques and matrices to evaluate the generated summaries using language generation models. This survey endeavors to provide a comprehensive overview of ATS by presenting the progression of language processing regarding this task through a breakdown of diverse systems and architectures accompanied by technical and mathematical explanations of their operations.
The language generation and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have enabled conversational systems with impressive performance in a variety of tasks, from code generation, to composing essays, to passing STEM and legal exams, to a new paradigm for knowledge search. Besides those short-term use applications, LLMs are increasingly used to help with real-life goals or tasks that take a long time to complete, involving multiple sessions across days, weeks, months, or even years. Thus to enable conversational systems for long term interactions and tasks, we need language-based agents that can plan for long horizons. Traditionally, such capabilities were addressed by reinforcement learning agents with hierarchical planning capabilities. In this work, we explore a novel architecture where the LLM acts as the meta-controller deciding the agent's next macro-action, and tool use augmented LLM-based option policies execute the selected macro-action. We instantiate this framework for a specific set of macro-actions enabling adaptive planning for users' personal plans through conversation and follow-up questions collecting user feedback. We show how this paradigm can be applicable in scenarios ranging from tutoring for academic and non-academic tasks to conversational coaching for personal health plans.
Steganography is the art and science of covert writing, with a broad range of applications interwoven within the realm of cybersecurity. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, its ability to synthesise realistic content emerges as a threat in the hands of cybercriminals who seek to manipulate and misrepresent the truth. Such synthetic content introduces a non-trivial risk of overwriting the subtle changes made for the purpose of steganography. When the signals in both the spatial and temporal domains are vulnerable to unforeseen overwriting, it calls for reflection on what, if any, remains invariant. This study proposes a paradigm in steganography for audiovisual media, where messages are concealed beyond both spatial and temporal domains. A chain of multimodal artificial intelligence is developed to deconstruct audiovisual content into a cover text, embed a message within the linguistic domain, and then reconstruct the audiovisual content through synchronising both auditory and visual modalities with the resultant stego text. The message is encoded by biasing the word sampling process of a language generation model and decoded by analysing the probability distribution of word choices. The accuracy of message transmission is evaluated under both zero-bit and multi-bit capacity settings. Fidelity is assessed through both biometric and semantic similarities, capturing the identities of the recorded face and voice, as well as the core ideas conveyed through the media. Secrecy is examined through statistical comparisons between cover and stego texts. Robustness is tested across various scenarios, including audiovisual resampling, face-swapping, voice-cloning and their combinations.
Goal-oriented de novo molecule design, namely generating molecules with specific property or substructure constraints, is a crucial yet challenging task in drug discovery. Existing methods, such as Bayesian optimization and reinforcement learning, often require training multiple property predictors and struggle to incorporate substructure constraints. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation, we propose ChatMol, a novel approach that leverages LLMs for molecule design across diverse constraint settings. Initially, we crafted a molecule representation compatible with LLMs and validated its efficacy across multiple online LLMs. Afterwards, we developed specific prompts geared towards diverse constrained molecule generation tasks to further fine-tune current LLMs while integrating feedback learning derived from property prediction. Finally, to address the limitations of LLMs in numerical recognition, we referred to the position encoding method and incorporated additional encoding for numerical values within the prompt. Experimental results across single-property, substructure-property, and multi-property constrained tasks demonstrate that ChatMol consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including VAE and RL-based methods. Notably, in multi-objective binding affinity maximization task, ChatMol achieves a significantly lower KD value of 0.25 for the protein target ESR1, while maintaining the highest overall performance, surpassing previous methods by 4.76%. Meanwhile, with numerical enhancement, the Pearson correlation coefficient between the instructed property values and those of the generated molecules increased by up to 0.49. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs as a versatile framework for molecule generation, offering a promising alternative to traditional latent space and RL-based approaches.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools in artificial intelligence (AI), exhibiting remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks such as text generation, reasoning, and decision-making. While their success has primarily been driven by advances in computational power and deep learning architectures, emerging problems -- in areas such as uncertainty quantification, decision-making, causal inference, and distribution shift -- require a deeper engagement with the field of statistics. This paper explores potential areas where statisticians can make important contributions to the development of LLMs, particularly those that aim to engender trustworthiness and transparency for human users. Thus, we focus on issues such as uncertainty quantification, interpretability, fairness, privacy, watermarking and model adaptation. We also consider possible roles for LLMs in statistical analysis. By bridging AI and statistics, we aim to foster a deeper collaboration that advances both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of LLMs, ultimately shaping their role in addressing complex societal challenges.
Synthetic data has the potential to improve the performance, training efficiency, and privacy of real training examples. Nevertheless, existing approaches for synthetic text generation are mostly heuristics and cannot generate human-readable text without compromising the privacy of real data or provide performance guarantees for training Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose the first theoretically rigorous approach for generating synthetic human-readable text that guarantees the convergence and performance of LLMs during fine-tuning on a target task. To do so, we leverage Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) that iteratively optimizes the embeddings of synthetic examples to match the gradient of the target training or validation data, and maps them to a sequence of text tokens with low perplexity. In doing so, the generated synthetic text can guarantee convergence of the model to a close neighborhood of the solution obtained by fine-tuning on real data. Experiments on various classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, are commonly used to adapt LLMs. However, the effectiveness of standard PEFT methods is limited in low-resource scenarios with only a few hundred examples. Recent advances in interpretability research have inspired the emergence of activation editing (or steering) techniques, which modify the activations of specific model components. These methods, due to their extremely small parameter counts, show promise for small datasets. However, their performance is highly dependent on identifying the correct modules to edit and often lacks stability across different datasets. In this paper, we propose Joint Localization and Activation Editing (JoLA), a method that jointly learns (1) which heads in the Transformer to edit (2) whether the intervention should be additive, multiplicative, or both and (3) the intervention parameters themselves - the vectors applied as additive offsets or multiplicative scalings to the head output. Through evaluations on three benchmarks spanning commonsense reasoning, natural language understanding, and natural language generation, we demonstrate that JoLA consistently outperforms existing methods. The code for the method is released at https://github.com/wenlai-lavine/jola.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained popularity as a method for conveniently incorporating novel facts that were not seen during the pre-training stage in Large Language Model (LLM)-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. However, LLMs are known to encode significant levels of unfair social biases. The modulation of these biases by RAG in NLG systems is not well understood. In this paper, we systematically study the relationship between the different components of a RAG system and the social biases presented in the text generated across three languages (i.e. English, Japanese and Chinese) and four social bias types (i.e. gender, race, age and religion). Specifically, using the Bias Question Answering (BBQ) benchmark datasets, we evaluate the social biases in RAG responses from document collections with varying levels of stereotypical biases, employing multiple LLMs used as generators. We find that the biases in document collections are often amplified in the generated responses, even when the generating LLM exhibits a low-level of bias. Our findings raise concerns about the use of RAG as a technique for injecting novel facts into NLG systems and call for careful evaluation of potential social biases in RAG applications before their real-world deployment.
Deploying natural language generation systems in clinical settings remains challenging despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), which continue to exhibit hallucinations and factual inconsistencies, necessitating human oversight. This paper explores automated dataset augmentation using LLMs as human proxies to condition LLMs for clinician control without increasing cognitive workload. On the BioNLP ACL'24 Discharge Me! Shared Task, we achieve new state-of-the-art results with simpler methods than prior submissions through more efficient training, yielding a 9\% relative improvement without augmented training and up to 34\% with dataset augmentation. Preliminary human evaluation further supports the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the potential of augmenting clinical text generation for control to enhance relevance, accuracy, and factual consistency.
Brain activity translation into human language delivers the capability to revolutionize machine-human interaction while providing communication support to people with speech disability. Electronic decoding reaches a certain level of achievement yet current EEG-to-text decoding methods fail to reach open vocabularies and depth of meaning and individual brain-specific variables. We introduce a special framework which changes conventional closed-vocabulary EEG-to-text decoding approaches by integrating subject-specific learning models with natural language processing methods to resolve detection obstacles. This method applies a deep representation learning approach to extract important EEG features which allow training of neural networks to create elaborate sentences that extend beyond original data content. The ZuCo dataset analysis demonstrates that research findings achieve higher BLEU, ROUGE and BERTScore performance when compared to current methods. The research proves how this framework functions as an effective approach to generate meaningful and correct texts while understanding individual brain variations. The proposed research aims to create a connection between open-vocabulary Text generation systems and human brain signal interpretation for developing efficacious brain-to-text systems. The research produces interdisciplinary effects through innovative assistive technology development and personalized communication systems which extend possibilities for human-computer interaction in various settings.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent, their generated outputs are proliferating across the web, risking a future where machine-generated content dilutes human-authored text. Since online data is the primary resource for LLM pre-training, subsequent models could be trained on an unknown portion of synthetic samples. This will lead to model collapse, a degenerative process whereby LLMs reinforce their own errors, converge to a low variance output distribution, and ultimately yield a declining performance. In this study, we investigate the impact of decoding strategy on model collapse, analysing the text characteristics at each model generation, the similarity to human references, and the resulting model performance. Using the decoding strategies that lead to the most significant degradation, we evaluate model collapse in more realistic scenarios where the origin of the data (human or synthetic) is unknown. We train a machine-generated text detector and propose an importance sampling approach to alleviate model collapse. Our method is validated on two LLM variants (GPT-2 and SmolLM2), across a range of model sizes (124M to 1.7B), on the open-ended text generation task. We demonstrate that it can not only prevent model collapse but also improve performance when sufficient human-authored samples are present. Source code: github.com/GeorgeDrayson/model_collapse.
While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs), its performance often falls short of Full Fine-Tuning (Full FT). Current methods optimize LoRA by initializing with static singular value decomposition (SVD) subsets, leading to suboptimal leveraging of pre-trained knowledge. Another path for improving LoRA is incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. However, weight misalignment and complex gradient dynamics make it challenging to adopt SVD prior to the LoRA MoE architecture. To mitigate these issues, we propose \underline{G}reat L\underline{o}R\underline{A} Mixture-of-Exper\underline{t} (GOAT), a framework that (1) adaptively integrates relevant priors using an SVD-structured MoE, and (2) aligns optimization with full fine-tuned MoE by deriving a theoretical scaling factor. We demonstrate that proper scaling, without modifying the architecture or training algorithms, boosts LoRA MoE's efficiency and performance. Experiments across 25 datasets, including natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, image classification, and natural language generation, demonstrate GOAT's state-of-the-art performance, closing the gap with Full FT.