Recent generative AI systems have demonstrated more advanced persuasive capabilities and are increasingly permeating areas of life where they can influence decision-making. Generative AI presents a new risk profile of persuasion due the opportunity for reciprocal exchange and prolonged interactions. This has led to growing concerns about harms from AI persuasion and how they can be mitigated, highlighting the need for a systematic study of AI persuasion. The current definitions of AI persuasion are unclear and related harms are insufficiently studied. Existing harm mitigation approaches prioritise harms from the outcome of persuasion over harms from the process of persuasion. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for the systematic study of AI persuasion. We first put forward definitions of persuasive generative AI. We distinguish between rationally persuasive generative AI, which relies on providing relevant facts, sound reasoning, or other forms of trustworthy evidence, and manipulative generative AI, which relies on taking advantage of cognitive biases and heuristics or misrepresenting information. We also put forward a map of harms from AI persuasion, including definitions and examples of economic, physical, environmental, psychological, sociocultural, political, privacy, and autonomy harm. We then introduce a map of mechanisms that contribute to harmful persuasion. Lastly, we provide an overview of approaches that can be used to mitigate against process harms of persuasion, including prompt engineering for manipulation classification and red teaming. Future work will operationalise these mitigations and study the interaction between different types of mechanisms of persuasion.
In this paper, we present PRISM, a Promptable and Robust Interactive Segmentation Model, aiming for precise segmentation of 3D medical images. PRISM accepts various visual inputs, including points, boxes, and scribbles as sparse prompts, as well as masks as dense prompts. Specifically, PRISM is designed with four principles to achieve robustness: (1) Iterative learning. The model produces segmentations by using visual prompts from previous iterations to achieve progressive improvement. (2) Confidence learning. PRISM employs multiple segmentation heads per input image, each generating a continuous map and a confidence score to optimize predictions. (3) Corrective learning. Following each segmentation iteration, PRISM employs a shallow corrective refinement network to reassign mislabeled voxels. (4) Hybrid design. PRISM integrates hybrid encoders to better capture both the local and global information. Comprehensive validation of PRISM is conducted using four public datasets for tumor segmentation in the colon, pancreas, liver, and kidney, highlighting challenges caused by anatomical variations and ambiguous boundaries in accurate tumor identification. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, both with and without prompt engineering, PRISM significantly improves performance, achieving results that are close to human levels. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/PRISM.
This paper presents a study on the integration of domain-specific knowledge in prompt engineering to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in scientific domains. A benchmark dataset is curated to encapsulate the intricate physical-chemical properties of small molecules, their drugability for pharmacology, alongside the functional attributes of enzymes and crystal materials, underscoring the relevance and applicability across biological and chemical domains.The proposed domain-knowledge embedded prompt engineering method outperforms traditional prompt engineering strategies on various metrics, including capability, accuracy, F1 score, and hallucination drop. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated through case studies on complex materials including the MacMillan catalyst, paclitaxel, and lithium cobalt oxide. The results suggest that domain-knowledge prompts can guide LLMs to generate more accurate and relevant responses, highlighting the potential of LLMs as powerful tools for scientific discovery and innovation when equipped with domain-specific prompts. The study also discusses limitations and future directions for domain-specific prompt engineering development.
In the burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and LLaMA, Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for boosting zero-shot or in-context learning (ICL) through prompt modifications. Yet, the realm of the sample design for downstream fine-tuning, crucial for task-specific LLM adaptation, is largely unexplored. This paper introduces Sample Design Engineering (SDE), a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs' post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs. We conduct a series of in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) experiments to assess the impact of various design options on LLMs' downstream performance, revealing several intriguing patterns that hold consistently across different LLMs. Based on these insights, we propose an integrated SDE strategy, combining the most effective options, and validate its consistent superiority over heuristic sample designs in complex downstream tasks like multi-aspect sentiment analysis, event extraction, and nested entity recognition. Additionally, analyses of LLMs' inherent prompt/output perplexity, zero-shot, and ICL abilities illustrate that good PE strategies may not always translate to good SDE strategies. Code available at https://github.com/beyondguo/LLM-Tuning.
In this paper, we focus on the challenging task of reliably estimating factual knowledge that is embedded inside large language models (LLMs). To avoid reliability concerns with prior approaches, we propose to eliminate prompt engineering when probing LLMs for factual knowledge. Our approach, called Zero-Prompt Latent Knowledge Estimator (ZP-LKE), leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs to communicate both the factual knowledge question as well as the expected answer format. Our knowledge estimator is both conceptually simpler (i.e., doesn't depend on meta-linguistic judgments of LLMs) and easier to apply (i.e., is not LLM-specific), and we demonstrate that it can surface more of the latent knowledge embedded in LLMs. We also investigate how different design choices affect the performance of ZP-LKE. Using the proposed estimator, we perform a large-scale evaluation of the factual knowledge of a variety of open-source LLMs, like OPT, Pythia, Llama(2), Mistral, Gemma, etc. over a large set of relations and facts from the Wikidata knowledge base. We observe differences in the factual knowledge between different model families and models of different sizes, that some relations are consistently better known than others but that models differ in the precise facts they know, and differences in the knowledge of base models and their finetuned counterparts. Code available at: https://github.com/QinyuanWu0710/ZeroPrompt_LKE
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), offer promising prospects for aiding system administrators in managing the complexity of modern networks. However, despite this potential, a significant gap exists in the literature regarding the extent to which LLMs can understand computer networks. Without empirical evidence, system administrators might rely on these models without assurance of their efficacy in performing network-related tasks accurately. In this paper, we are the first to conduct an exhaustive study on LLMs' comprehension of computer networks. We formulate several research questions to determine whether LLMs can provide correct answers when supplied with a network topology and questions on it. To assess them, we developed a thorough framework for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in various network-related tasks. We evaluate our framework on multiple computer networks employing proprietary (e.g., GPT4) and open-source (e.g., Llama2) models. Our findings in general purpose LLMs using a zero-shot scenario demonstrate promising results, with the best model achieving an average accuracy of 79.3%. Proprietary LLMs achieve noteworthy results in small and medium networks, while challenges persist in comprehending complex network topologies, particularly for open-source models. Moreover, we provide insight into how prompt engineering can enhance the accuracy of some tasks.
Model customization introduces new concepts to existing text-to-image models, enabling the generation of these new concepts/objects in novel contexts. However, such methods lack accurate camera view control with respect to the new object, and users must resort to prompt engineering (e.g., adding ``top-view'') to achieve coarse view control. In this work, we introduce a new task -- enabling explicit control of the object viewpoint in the customization of text-to-image diffusion models. This allows us to modify the custom object's properties and generate it in various background scenes via text prompts, all while incorporating the object viewpoint as an additional control. This new task presents significant challenges, as one must harmoniously merge a 3D representation from the multi-view images with the 2D pre-trained model. To bridge this gap, we propose to condition the diffusion process on the 3D object features rendered from the target viewpoint. During training, we fine-tune the 3D feature prediction modules to reconstruct the object's appearance and geometry, while reducing overfitting to the input multi-view images. Our method outperforms existing image editing and model customization baselines in preserving the custom object's identity while following the target object viewpoint and the text prompt.
In this study, we introduce DeepLocalization, an innovative framework devised for the real-time localization of actions tailored explicitly for monitoring driver behavior. Utilizing the power of advanced deep learning methodologies, our objective is to tackle the critical issue of distracted driving-a significant factor contributing to road accidents. Our strategy employs a dual approach: leveraging Graph-Based Change-Point Detection for pinpointing actions in time alongside a Video Large Language Model (Video-LLM) for precisely categorizing activities. Through careful prompt engineering, we customize the Video-LLM to adeptly handle driving activities' nuances, ensuring its classification efficacy even with sparse data. Engineered to be lightweight, our framework is optimized for consumer-grade GPUs, making it vastly applicable in practical scenarios. We subjected our method to rigorous testing on the SynDD2 dataset, a complex benchmark for distracted driving behaviors, where it demonstrated commendable performance-achieving 57.5% accuracy in event classification and 51% in event detection. These outcomes underscore the substantial promise of DeepLocalization in accurately identifying diverse driver behaviors and their temporal occurrences, all within the bounds of limited computational resources.
We develop a simple and straightforward methodology to create AI computer agents that can carry out diverse computer tasks and self-improve by developing tools and augmentations to enable themselves to solve increasingly complex tasks. As large language models (LLMs) have been shown to benefit from non-parametric augmentations, a significant body of recent work has focused on developing software that augments LLMs with various capabilities. Rather than manually developing static software to augment LLMs through human engineering effort, we propose that an LLM agent can systematically generate software to augment itself. We show, through a few case studies, that a minimal querying loop with appropriate prompt engineering allows an LLM to generate and use various augmentations, freely extending its own capabilities to carry out real-world computer tasks. Starting with only terminal access, we prompt an LLM agent to augment itself with retrieval, internet search, web navigation, and text editor capabilities. The agent effectively uses these various tools to solve problems including automated software development and web-based tasks.
In this paper, we aim to generate text classification data given arbitrary class definitions (i.e., user instruction), so one can train a small text classifier without any human annotation or raw corpus. Compared with pioneer attempts, our proposed Incubator is the first framework that can handle complicated and even mutually dependent classes (e.g., "TED Talk given by Educator" and "Other"). Specifically, Incubator is an LLM firstly tuned on the instruction-to-data mappings that we obtained from classification datasets and descriptions on HuggingFace together with in-context augmentation by GPT-4. We then refine Incubator by learning on the cluster centers of semantic textual embeddings to emphasize the uniformity and semantic diversity in generations. We compare Incubator on various classification tasks with strong baselines such as direct LLM-based inference and training data generation by prompt engineering. Experiments show Incubator is able to (1) perform well on traditional benchmarks, (2) take label dependency and user preference into consideration, and (3) enable logical text mining by incubating multiple classifiers.
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly commonplace, concern about distinguishing between human and AI text increases as well. The growing power of these models is of particular concern to teachers, who may worry that students will use LLMs to write school assignments. Facing a technology with which they are unfamiliar, teachers may turn to publicly-available AI text detectors. Yet the accuracy of many of these detectors has not been thoroughly verified, posing potential harm to students who are falsely accused of academic dishonesty. In this paper, we evaluate three different AI text detectors-Kirchenbauer et al. watermarks, ZeroGPT, and GPTZero-against human and AI-generated essays. We find that watermarking results in a high false positive rate, and that ZeroGPT has both high false positive and false negative rates. Further, we are able to significantly increase the false negative rate of all detectors by using ChatGPT 3.5 to paraphrase the original AI-generated texts, thereby effectively bypassing the detectors.
The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly influenced by the quality of the prompts provided. In response, researchers have developed enormous prompt engineering strategies aimed at modifying the prompt text to enhance task performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique termed position engineering, which offers a more efficient way to guide large language models. Unlike prompt engineering, which requires substantial effort to modify the text provided to LLMs, position engineering merely involves altering the positional information in the prompt without modifying the text itself. We have evaluated position engineering in two widely-used LLM scenarios: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and in-context learning (ICL). Our findings show that position engineering substantially improves upon the baseline in both cases. Position engineering thus represents a promising new strategy for exploiting the capabilities of large language models.
Light curves serve as a valuable source of information on stellar formation and evolution. With the rapid advancement of machine learning techniques, it can be effectively processed to extract astronomical patterns and information. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep-learning and large language model (LLM) based models for the automatic classification of variable star light curves, based on large datasets from the Kepler and K2 missions. Special emphasis is placed on Cepheids, RR Lyrae, and eclipsing binaries, examining the influence of observational cadence and phase distribution on classification precision. Employing AutoDL optimization, we achieve striking performance with the 1D-Convolution+BiLSTM architecture and the Swin Transformer, hitting accuracies of 94\% and 99\% correspondingly, with the latter demonstrating a notable 83\% accuracy in discerning the elusive Type II Cepheids-comprising merely 0.02\% of the total dataset.We unveil StarWhisper LightCurve (LC), an innovative Series comprising three LLM-based models: LLM, multimodal large language model (MLLM), and Large Audio Language Model (LALM). Each model is fine-tuned with strategic prompt engineering and customized training methods to explore the emergent abilities of these models for astronomical data. Remarkably, StarWhisper LC Series exhibit high accuracies around 90\%, significantly reducing the need for explicit feature engineering, thereby paving the way for streamlined parallel data processing and the progression of multifaceted multimodal models in astronomical applications. The study furnishes two detailed catalogs illustrating the impacts of phase and sampling intervals on deep learning classification accuracy, showing that a substantial decrease of up to 14\% in observation duration and 21\% in sampling points can be realized without compromising accuracy by more than 10\%.
Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) as a pairwise mention classification task is expensive both for automated systems and manual annotations. The task's quadratic difficulty is exacerbated when using Large Language Models (LLMs), making prompt engineering for ECR prohibitively costly. In this work, we propose a graphical representation of events, X-AMR, anchored around individual mentions using a \textbf{cross}-document version of \textbf{A}bstract \textbf{M}eaning \textbf{R}epresentation. We then linearize the ECR with a novel multi-hop coreference algorithm over the event graphs. The event graphs simplify ECR, making it a) LLM cost-effective, b) compositional and interpretable, and c) easily annotated. For a fair assessment, we first enrich an existing ECR benchmark dataset with these event graphs using an annotator-friendly tool we introduce. Then, we employ GPT-4, the newest LLM by OpenAI, for these annotations. Finally, using the ECR algorithm, we assess GPT-4 against humans and analyze its limitations. Through this research, we aim to advance the state-of-the-art for efficient ECR and shed light on the potential shortcomings of current LLMs at this task. Code and annotations: \url{https://github.com/ahmeshaf/gpt_coref}
Background: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life, particularly through chatbots utilizing natural language processing (NLP), presents both revolutionary potential and unique challenges. This intended to investigate how different input forms impact ChatGPT, a leading language model by OpenAI, performance in understanding and executing complex, multi-intention tasks. Design: Employing a case study methodology supplemented by discourse analysis, the research analyzes ChatGPT's responses to inputs varying from natural language to pseudo-code engineering. The study specifically examines the model's proficiency across four categories: understanding of intentions, interpretability, completeness, and creativity. Setting and Participants: As a theoretical exploration of AI interaction, this study focuses on the analysis of structured and unstructured inputs processed by ChatGPT, without direct human participants. Data collection and analysis: The research utilizes synthetic case scenarios, including the organization of a "weekly meal plan" and a "shopping list," to assess ChatGPT's response to prompts in both natural language and pseudo-code engineering. The analysis is grounded in the identification of patterns, contradictions, and unique response elements across different input formats. Results: Findings reveal that pseudo-code engineering inputs significantly enhance the clarity and determinism of ChatGPT's responses, reducing ambiguity inherent in natural language. Enhanced natural language, structured through prompt engineering techniques, similarly improves the model's interpretability and creativity. Conclusions: The study underscores the potential of pseudo-code engineering in refining human-AI interaction and achieving more deterministic, concise, and direct outcomes, advocating for its broader application across disciplines requiring precise AI responses.
Few-shot learning has been successfully applied to medical image classification as only very few medical examples are available for training. Due to the challenging problem of limited number of annotated medical images, image representations should not be solely derived from a single image modality which is insufficient for characterizing concept classes. In this paper, we propose a new prompting multi-modal model paradigm on medical image classification based on multi-modal foundation models, called PM2. Besides image modality,PM2 introduces another supplementary text input, known as prompt, to further describe corresponding image or concept classes and facilitate few-shot learning across diverse modalities. To better explore the potential of prompt engineering, we empirically investigate five distinct prompt schemes under the new paradigm. Furthermore, linear probing in multi-modal models acts as a linear classification head taking as input only class token, which ignores completely merits of rich statistics inherent in high-level visual tokens. Thus, we alternatively perform a linear classification on feature distribution of visual tokens and class token simultaneously. To effectively mine such rich statistics, a global covariance pooling with efficient matrix power normalization is used to aggregate visual tokens. Then we study and combine two classification heads. One is shared for class token of image from vision encoder and prompt representation encoded by text encoder. The other is to classification on feature distribution of visual tokens from vision encoder. Extensive experiments on three medical datasets show that our PM2 significantly outperforms counterparts regardless of prompt schemes and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential as an intelligent agent. However, existing researches mainly focus on enhancing the agent's reasoning or decision-making abilities through well-designed prompt engineering or task-specific fine-tuning, ignoring the procedure of exploration and exploitation. When addressing complex tasks within open-world interactive environments, these methods exhibit limitations. Firstly, the lack of global information of environments leads to greedy decisions, resulting in sub-optimal solutions. On the other hand, irrelevant information acquired from the environment not only adversely introduces noise, but also incurs additional cost. This paper proposes a novel approach, Weak Exploration to Strong Exploitation (WESE), to enhance LLM agents in solving open-world interactive tasks. Concretely, WESE involves decoupling the exploration and exploitation process, employing a cost-effective weak agent to perform exploration tasks for global knowledge. A knowledge graph-based strategy is then introduced to store the acquired knowledge and extract task-relevant knowledge, enhancing the stronger agent in success rate and efficiency for the exploitation task. Our approach is flexible enough to incorporate diverse tasks, and obtains significant improvements in both success rates and efficiency across four interactive benchmarks.
Programmers frequently engage with machine learning tutorials in computational notebooks and have been adopting code generation technologies based on large language models (LLMs). However, they encounter difficulties in understanding and working with code produced by LLMs. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel workflow into computational notebooks that augments LLM-based code generation with an additional ephemeral UI step, offering users UI scaffolds as an intermediate stage between user prompts and code generation. We present this workflow in BISCUIT, an extension for JupyterLab that provides users with ephemeral UIs generated by LLMs based on the context of their code and intentions, scaffolding users to understand, guide, and explore with LLM-generated code. Through a user study where 10 novices used BISCUIT for machine learning tutorials, we found that BISCUIT offers users representations of code to aid their understanding, reduces the complexity of prompt engineering, and creates a playground for users to explore different variables and iterate on their ideas.
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated significant proficiency in solving a wide range of general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have observed a direct correlation between the performance of these models and their sizes. As a result, the sizes of these models have notably expanded in recent years, persuading researchers to adopt the term large language models (LLMs) to characterize the larger-sized PLMs. The size expansion comes with a distinct capability called in-context learning (ICL), which represents a special form of prompting and allows the models to be utilized through the presentation of demonstration examples without modifications to the model parameters. Although interesting, privacy concerns have become a major obstacle in its widespread usage. Multiple studies have examined the privacy risks linked to ICL and prompting in general, and have devised techniques to alleviate these risks. Thus, there is a necessity to organize these mitigation techniques for the benefit of the community. This survey provides a systematic overview of the privacy protection methods employed during ICL and prompting in general. We review, analyze, and compare different methods under this paradigm. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the resources accessible for the development of these frameworks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of these frameworks and offer a detailed examination of the promising areas that necessitate further exploration.
Connected multi-agent robotic systems (MRS) are prone to deadlocks in an obstacle environment where the robots can get stuck away from their desired locations under a smooth low-level control policy. Without an external intervention, often in terms of a high-level command, a low-level control policy cannot resolve such deadlocks. Utilizing the generalizability and low data requirements of foundation models, this paper explores the possibility of using text-based models, i.e., large language models (LLMs), and text-and-image-based models, i.e., vision-language models (VLMs), as high-level planners for deadlock resolution. We propose a hierarchical control framework where a foundation model-based high-level planner helps to resolve deadlocks by assigning a leader to the MRS along with a set of waypoints for the MRS leader. Then, a low-level distributed control policy based on graph neural networks is executed to safely follow these waypoints, thereby evading the deadlock. We conduct extensive experiments on various MRS environments using the best available pre-trained LLMs and VLMs. We compare their performance with a graph-based planner in terms of effectiveness in helping the MRS reach their target locations and computational time. Our results illustrate that, compared to grid-based planners, the foundation models perform better in terms of the goal-reaching rate and computational time for complex environments, which helps us conclude that foundation models can assist MRS operating in complex obstacle-cluttered environments to resolve deadlocks efficiently.