Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedback

Recent work has shown that asking language models to generate reasoning steps improves performance on many reasoning tasks. When moving beyond prompting, this raises the question of how we should supervise such models: outcome-based approaches which supervise the final result, or process-based approaches which supervise the reasoning process itself? Differences between these approaches might naturally be expected not just in final-answer errors but also in reasoning errors, which can be difficult to detect and are problematic in many real-world domains such as education. We run the first comprehensive comparison between process- and outcome-based approaches trained on a natural language task, GSM8K. We find that pure outcome-based supervision produces similar final-answer error rates with less label supervision. However, for correct reasoning steps we find it necessary to use process-based supervision or supervision from learned reward models that emulate process-based feedback. In total, we improve the previous best results from 16.8% $\to$ 12.7% final-answer error and 14.0% $\to$ 3.4% reasoning error among final-answer-correct solutions.

Goal Misgeneralization: Why Correct Specifications Aren't Enough For Correct Goals

The field of AI alignment is concerned with AI systems that pursue unintended goals. One commonly studied mechanism by which an unintended goal might arise is specification gaming, in which the designer-provided specification is flawed in a way that the designers did not foresee. However, an AI system may pursue an undesired goal even when the specification is correct, in the case of goal misgeneralization. Goal misgeneralization is a specific form of robustness failure for learning algorithms in which the learned program competently pursues an undesired goal that leads to good performance in training situations but bad performance in novel test situations. We demonstrate that goal misgeneralization can occur in practical systems by providing several examples in deep learning systems across a variety of domains. Extrapolating forward to more capable systems, we provide hypotheticals that illustrate how goal misgeneralization could lead to catastrophic risk. We suggest several research directions that could reduce the risk of goal misgeneralization for future systems.

Improving alignment of dialogue agents via targeted human judgements

We present Sparrow, an information-seeking dialogue agent trained to be more helpful, correct, and harmless compared to prompted language model baselines. We use reinforcement learning from human feedback to train our models with two new additions to help human raters judge agent behaviour. First, to make our agent more helpful and harmless, we break down the requirements for good dialogue into natural language rules the agent should follow, and ask raters about each rule separately. We demonstrate that this breakdown enables us to collect more targeted human judgements of agent behaviour and allows for more efficient rule-conditional reward models. Second, our agent provides evidence from sources supporting factual claims when collecting preference judgements over model statements. For factual questions, evidence provided by Sparrow supports the sampled response 78% of the time. Sparrow is preferred more often than baselines while being more resilient to adversarial probing by humans, violating our rules only 8% of the time when probed. Finally, we conduct extensive analyses showing that though our model learns to follow our rules it can exhibit distributional biases.

Characteristics of Harmful Text: Towards Rigorous Benchmarking of Language Models

Large language models produce human-like text that drive a growing number of applications. However, recent literature and, increasingly, real world observations, have demonstrated that these models can generate language that is toxic, biased, untruthful or otherwise harmful. Though work to evaluate language model harms is under way, translating foresight about which harms may arise into rigorous benchmarks is not straightforward. To facilitate this translation, we outline six ways of characterizing harmful text which merit explicit consideration when designing new benchmarks. We then use these characteristics as a lens to identify trends and gaps in existing benchmarks. Finally, we apply them in a case study of the Perspective API, a toxicity classifier that is widely used in harm benchmarks. Our characteristics provide one piece of the bridge that translates between foresight and effective evaluation.

Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models

This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Interaction Harms, VI. Automation, Access, and Environmental Harms. The first area concerns the perpetuation of stereotypes, unfair discrimination, exclusionary norms, toxic language, and lower performance by social group for LMs. The second focuses on risks from private data leaks or LMs correctly inferring sensitive information. The third addresses risks arising from poor, false or misleading information including in sensitive domains, and knock-on risks such as the erosion of trust in shared information. The fourth considers risks from actors who try to use LMs to cause harm. The fifth focuses on risks specific to LLMs used to underpin conversational agents that interact with human users, including unsafe use, manipulation or deception. The sixth discusses the risk of environmental harm, job automation, and other challenges that may have a disparate effect on different social groups or communities. In total, we review 21 risks in-depth. We discuss the points of origin of different risks and point to potential mitigation approaches. Lastly, we discuss organisational responsibilities in implementing mitigations, and the role of collaboration and participation. We highlight directions for further research, particularly on expanding the toolkit for assessing and evaluating the outlined risks in LMs.

An Empirical Investigation of Learning from Biased Toxicity Labels

Collecting annotations from human raters often results in a trade-off between the quantity of labels one wishes to gather and the quality of these labels. As such, it is often only possible to gather a small amount of high-quality labels. In this paper, we study how different training strategies can leverage a small dataset of human-annotated labels and a large but noisy dataset of synthetically generated labels (which exhibit bias against identity groups) for predicting toxicity of online comments. We evaluate the accuracy and fairness properties of these approaches, and trade-offs between the two. While we find that initial training on all of the data and fine-tuning on clean data produces models with the highest AUC, we find that no single strategy performs best across all fairness metrics.

Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models

Large language models (LM) generate remarkably fluent text and can be efficiently adapted across NLP tasks. Measuring and guaranteeing the quality of generated text in terms of safety is imperative for deploying LMs in the real world; to this end, prior work often relies on automatic evaluation of LM toxicity. We critically discuss this approach, evaluate several toxicity mitigation strategies with respect to both automatic and human evaluation, and analyze consequences of toxicity mitigation in terms of model bias and LM quality. We demonstrate that while basic intervention strategies can effectively optimize previously established automatic metrics on the RealToxicityPrompts dataset, this comes at the cost of reduced LM coverage for both texts about, and dialects of, marginalized groups. Additionally, we find that human raters often disagree with high automatic toxicity scores after strong toxicity reduction interventions -- highlighting further the nuances involved in careful evaluation of LM toxicity.

Verifying Probabilistic Specifications with Functional Lagrangians

We propose a general framework for verifying input-output specifications of neural networks using functional Lagrange multipliers that generalizes standard Lagrangian duality. We derive theoretical properties of the framework, which can handle arbitrary probabilistic specifications, showing that it provably leads to tight verification when a sufficiently flexible class of functional multipliers is chosen. With a judicious choice of the class of functional multipliers, the framework can accommodate desired trade-offs between tightness and complexity. We demonstrate empirically that the framework can handle a diverse set of networks, including Bayesian neural networks with Gaussian posterior approximations, MC-dropout networks, and verify specifications on adversarial robustness and out-of-distribution(OOD) detection. Our framework improves upon prior work in some settings and also generalizes to new stochastic networks and probabilistic specifications, like distributionally robust OOD detection.