Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers

Scientific publishing lays the foundation of science by disseminating research findings, fostering collaboration, encouraging reproducibility, and ensuring that scientific knowledge is accessible, verifiable, and built upon over time. Recently, there has been immense speculation about how many people are using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in their academic writing, and to what extent this tool might have an effect on global scientific practices. However, we lack a precise measure of the proportion of academic writing substantially modified or produced by LLMs. To address this gap, we conduct the first systematic, large-scale analysis across 950,965 papers published between January 2020 and February 2024 on the arXiv, bioRxiv, and Nature portfolio journals, using a population-level statistical framework to measure the prevalence of LLM-modified content over time. Our statistical estimation operates on the corpus level and is more robust than inference on individual instances. Our findings reveal a steady increase in LLM usage, with the largest and fastest growth observed in Computer Science papers (up to 17.5%). In comparison, Mathematics papers and the Nature portfolio showed the least LLM modification (up to 6.3%). Moreover, at an aggregate level, our analysis reveals that higher levels of LLM-modification are associated with papers whose first authors post preprints more frequently, papers in more crowded research areas, and papers of shorter lengths. Our findings suggests that LLMs are being broadly used in scientific writings.

pyvene: A Library for Understanding and Improving PyTorch Models via Interventions

Interventions on model-internal states are fundamental operations in many areas of AI, including model editing, steering, robustness, and interpretability. To facilitate such research, we introduce $\textbf{pyvene}$, an open-source Python library that supports customizable interventions on a range of different PyTorch modules. $\textbf{pyvene}$ supports complex intervention schemes with an intuitive configuration format, and its interventions can be static or include trainable parameters. We show how $\textbf{pyvene}$ provides a unified and extensible framework for performing interventions on neural models and sharing the intervened upon models with others. We illustrate the power of the library via interpretability analyses using causal abstraction and knowledge localization. We publish our library through Python Package Index (PyPI) and provide code, documentation, and tutorials at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/pyvene.

RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations

Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute-Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/explanare/ravel.

CommVQA: Situating Visual Question Answering in Communicative Contexts

Current visual question answering (VQA) models tend to be trained and evaluated on image-question pairs in isolation. However, the questions people ask are dependent on their informational needs and prior knowledge about the image content. To evaluate how situating images within naturalistic contexts shapes visual questions, we introduce CommVQA, a VQA dataset consisting of images, image descriptions, real-world communicative scenarios where the image might appear (e.g., a travel website), and follow-up questions and answers conditioned on the scenario. We show that CommVQA poses a challenge for current models. Providing contextual information to VQA models improves performance broadly, highlighting the relevance of situating systems within a communicative scenario.

CausalGym: Benchmarking causal interpretability methods on linguistic tasks

Language models (LMs) have proven to be powerful tools for psycholinguistic research, but most prior work has focused on purely behavioural measures (e.g., surprisal comparisons). At the same time, research in model interpretability has begun to illuminate the abstract causal mechanisms shaping LM behavior. To help bring these strands of research closer together, we introduce CausalGym. We adapt and expand the SyntaxGym suite of tasks to benchmark the ability of interpretability methods to causally affect model behaviour. To illustrate how CausalGym can be used, we study the pythia models (14M--6.9B) and assess the causal efficacy of a wide range of interpretability methods, including linear probing and distributed alignment search (DAS). We find that DAS outperforms the other methods, and so we use it to study the learning trajectory of two difficult linguistic phenomena in pythia-1b: negative polarity item licensing and filler--gap dependencies. Our analysis shows that the mechanism implementing both of these tasks is learned in discrete stages, not gradually.

A Reply to Makelov et al. 's "Interpretability Illusion" Arguments

We respond to the recent paper by Makelov et al. (2023), which reviews subspace interchange intervention methods like distributed alignment search (DAS; Geiger et al. 2023) and claims that these methods potentially cause "interpretability illusions". We first review Makelov et al. (2023)'s technical notion of what an "interpretability illusion" is, and then we show that even intuitive and desirable explanations can qualify as illusions in this sense. As a result, their method of discovering "illusions" can reject explanations they consider "non-illusory". We then argue that the illusions Makelov et al. (2023) see in practice are artifacts of their training and evaluation paradigms. We close by emphasizing that, though we disagree with their core characterization, Makelov et al. (2023)'s examples and discussion have undoubtedly pushed the field of interpretability forward.

In-Context Learning for Extreme Multi-Label Classification

Multi-label classification problems with thousands of classes are hard to solve with in-context learning alone, as language models (LMs) might lack prior knowledge about the precise classes or how to assign them, and it is generally infeasible to demonstrate every class in a prompt. We propose a general program, $\texttt{Infer--Retrieve--Rank}$, that defines multi-step interactions between LMs and retrievers to efficiently tackle such problems. We implement this program using the $\texttt{DSPy}$ programming model, which specifies in-context systems in a declarative manner, and use $\texttt{DSPy}$ optimizers to tune it towards specific datasets by bootstrapping only tens of few-shot examples. Our primary extreme classification program, optimized separately for each task, attains state-of-the-art results across three benchmarks (HOUSE, TECH, TECHWOLF). We apply the same program to a benchmark with vastly different characteristics and attain competitive performance as well (BioDEX). Unlike prior work, our proposed solution requires no finetuning, is easily applicable to new tasks, alleviates prompt engineering, and requires only tens of labeled examples. Our code is public at https://github.com/KarelDO/xmc.dspy.

Mission: Impossible Language Models

Chomsky and others have very directly claimed that large language models (LLMs) are equally capable of learning languages that are possible and impossible for humans to learn. However, there is very little published experimental evidence to support such a claim. Here, we develop a set of synthetic impossible languages of differing complexity, each designed by systematically altering English data with unnatural word orders and grammar rules. These languages lie on an impossibility continuum: at one end are languages that are inherently impossible, such as random and irreversible shuffles of English words, and on the other, languages that may not be intuitively impossible but are often considered so in linguistics, particularly those with rules based on counting word positions. We report on a wide range of evaluations to assess the capacity of GPT-2 small models to learn these uncontroversially impossible languages, and crucially, we perform these assessments at various stages throughout training to compare the learning process for each language. Our core finding is that GPT-2 struggles to learn impossible languages when compared to English as a control, challenging the core claim. More importantly, we hope our approach opens up a productive line of inquiry in which different LLM architectures are tested on a variety of impossible languages in an effort to learn more about how LLMs can be used as tools for these cognitive and typological investigations.

I am a Strange Dataset: Metalinguistic Tests for Language Models

Statements involving metalinguistic self-reference ("This paper has six sections.") are prevalent in many domains. Can large language models (LLMs) handle such language? In this paper, we present "I am a Strange Dataset", a new dataset for addressing this question. There are two subtasks: generation and verification. In generation, models continue statements like "The penultimate word in this sentence is" (where a correct continuation is "is"). In verification, models judge the truth of statements like "The penultimate word in this sentence is sentence." (false). We also provide minimally different metalinguistic non-self-reference examples to complement the main dataset by probing for whether models can handle metalinguistic language at all. The dataset is hand-crafted by experts and validated by non-expert annotators. We test a variety of open-source LLMs (7B to 70B parameters) as well as closed-source LLMs through APIs. All models perform close to chance across both subtasks and even on the non-self-referential metalinguistic control data, though we find some steady improvement with model scale. GPT 4 is the only model to consistently do significantly better than chance, and it is still only in the 60% range, while our untrained human annotators score well in the 89-93% range. The dataset and evaluation toolkit are available at https://github.com/TristanThrush/i-am-a-strange-dataset.

Building Efficient and Effective OpenQA Systems for Low-Resource Languages

Question answering (QA) is the task of answering questions posed in natural language with free-form natural language answers extracted from a given passage. In the OpenQA variant, only a question text is given, and the system must retrieve relevant passages from an unstructured knowledge source and use them to provide answers, which is the case in the mainstream QA systems on the Web. QA systems currently are mostly limited to the English language due to the lack of large-scale labeled QA datasets in non-English languages. In this paper, we show that effective, low-cost OpenQA systems can be developed for low-resource languages. The key ingredients are (1) weak supervision using machine-translated labeled datasets and (2) a relevant unstructured knowledge source in the target language. Furthermore, we show that only a few hundred gold assessment examples are needed to reliably evaluate these systems. We apply our method to Turkish as a challenging case study, since English and Turkish are typologically very distinct. We present SQuAD-TR, a machine translation of SQuAD2.0, and we build our OpenQA system by adapting ColBERT-QA for Turkish. We obtain a performance improvement of 9-34% in the EM score and 13-33% in the F1 score compared to the BM25-based and DPR-based baseline QA reader models by using two versions of Wikipedia dumps spanning two years. Our results show that SQuAD-TR makes OpenQA feasible for Turkish, which we hope encourages researchers to build OpenQA systems in other low-resource languages. We make all the code, models, and the dataset publicly available.