DELLA-Merging: Reducing Interference in Model Merging through Magnitude-Based Sampling

With the proliferation of domain-specific models, model merging has emerged as a set of techniques that combine the capabilities of multiple models into one that can multitask without the cost of additional training. In this paper, we propose a new model merging technique, Drop and rEscaLe via sampLing with mAgnitude (DELLA-Merging), that employs a novel pruning technique, MAGPRUNE, which shows significant advantages over DARE and TIES. MAGPRUNE first ranks the parameters in order of their magnitude and assigns higher dropout probabilities (p) to parameters with lower ranks corresponding to lower magnitudes. To approximate the original embeddings, MAGPRUNE employs a rescaling operation on the parameters that survive the random dropping by 1/(1 - p). On three different expert models considered for merging (LM, Math, Code) and corresponding benchmark datasets (AlpacaEval, GSM8K, MBPP), DELLA shows an average improvement of 2.4 points over baseline methods employing delta parameter pruning (an improvement of 3.6 points over TIES, 1.2 points over DARE), and 11.1 points over the no-pruning baseline (TA). We release the source code at: https://github.com/declare-lab/della.

Ruby Teaming: Improving Quality Diversity Search with Memory for Automated Red Teaming

We propose Ruby Teaming, a method that improves on Rainbow Teaming by including a memory cache as its third dimension. The memory dimension provides cues to the mutator to yield better-quality prompts, both in terms of attack success rate (ASR) and quality diversity. The prompt archive generated by Ruby Teaming has an ASR of 74%, which is 20% higher than the baseline. In terms of quality diversity, Ruby Teaming outperforms Rainbow Teaming by 6% and 3% on Shannon's Evenness Index (SEI) and Simpson's Diversity Index (SDI), respectively.

HyperTTS: Parameter Efficient Adaptation in Text to Speech using Hypernetworks

Neural speech synthesis, or text-to-speech (TTS), aims to transform a signal from the text domain to the speech domain. While developing TTS architectures that train and test on the same set of speakers has seen significant improvements, out-of-domain speaker performance still faces enormous limitations. Domain adaptation on a new set of speakers can be achieved by fine-tuning the whole model for each new domain, thus making it parameter-inefficient. This problem can be solved by Adapters that provide a parameter-efficient alternative to domain adaptation. Although famous in NLP, speech synthesis has not seen much improvement from Adapters. In this work, we present HyperTTS, which comprises a small learnable network, "hypernetwork", that generates parameters of the Adapter blocks, allowing us to condition Adapters on speaker representations and making them dynamic. Extensive evaluations of two domain adaptation settings demonstrate its effectiveness in achieving state-of-the-art performance in the parameter-efficient regime. We also compare different variants of HyperTTS, comparing them with baselines in different studies. Promising results on the dynamic adaptation of adapter parameters using hypernetworks open up new avenues for domain-generic multi-speaker TTS systems. The audio samples and code are available at https://github.com/declare-lab/HyperTTS.

Language Models are Homer Simpson! Safety Re-Alignment of Fine-tuned Language Models through Task Arithmetic

Aligned language models face a significant limitation as their fine-tuning often results in compromised safety. To tackle this, we propose a simple method RESTA that performs LLM safety realignment. RESTA stands for REstoring Safety through Task Arithmetic. At its core, it involves a simple arithmetic addition of a safety vector to the weights of the compromised model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RESTA in both parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning, covering a wide range of downstream tasks, including instruction following in Chinese, English, and Hindi, as well as problem-solving capabilities in Code and Math. We also showcase the generalizability of RESTA on three existing safety evaluation benchmarks and a multilingual benchmark dataset proposed as a part of this work, consisting of 550 harmful questions covering 11 categories, each with 5 sub-categories of harm. Overall, RESTA decreases the harmfulness of the compromised model from 18.6% to 5.1% and from 9.2% to 1.5% in parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning, respectively, while maintaining most of the model's performance on the task. We release the source codes at: https://github.com/declare-lab/resta.

Adapter Pruning using Tropical Characterization

Adapters are widely popular parameter-efficient transfer learning approaches in natural language processing that insert trainable modules in between layers of a pre-trained language model. Apart from several heuristics, however, there has been a lack of studies analyzing the optimal number of adapter parameters needed for downstream applications. In this paper, we propose an adapter pruning approach by studying the tropical characteristics of trainable modules. We cast it as an optimization problem that aims to prune parameters from the adapter layers without changing the orientation of underlying tropical hypersurfaces. Our experiments on five NLP datasets show that tropical geometry tends to identify more relevant parameters to prune when compared with the magnitude-based baseline, while a combined approach works best across the tasks.

Language Model Unalignment: Parametric Red-Teaming to Expose Hidden Harms and Biases

Red-teaming has been a widely adopted way to evaluate the harmfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs). It aims to jailbreak a model's safety behavior to make it act as a helpful agent disregarding the harmfulness of the query. Existing methods are primarily based on input text-based red-teaming such as adversarial prompts, low-resource prompts, or contextualized prompts to condition the model in a way to bypass its safe behavior. Bypassing the guardrails uncovers hidden harmful information and biases in the model that are left untreated or newly introduced by its safety training. However, prompt-based attacks fail to provide such a diagnosis owing to their low attack success rate, and applicability to specific models. In this paper, we present a new perspective on LLM safety research i.e., parametric red-teaming through Unalignment. It simply (instruction) tunes the model parameters to break model guardrails that are not deeply rooted in the model's behavior. Unalignment using as few as 100 examples can significantly bypass commonly referred to as CHATGPT, to the point where it responds with an 88% success rate to harmful queries on two safety benchmark datasets. On open-source models such as VICUNA-7B and LLAMA-2-CHAT 7B AND 13B, it shows an attack success rate of more than 91%. On bias evaluations, Unalignment exposes inherent biases in safety-aligned models such as CHATGPT and LLAMA- 2-CHAT where the model's responses are strongly biased and opinionated 64% of the time.

Red-Teaming Large Language Models using Chain of Utterances for Safety-Alignment

Larger language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm with their massive multi-tasking capabilities simply by optimizing over a next-word prediction objective. With the emergence of their properties and encoded knowledge, the risk of LLMs producing harmful outputs increases, making them unfit for scalable deployment for the public. In this work, we propose a new safety evaluation benchmark RED-EVAL that carries out red-teaming. We show that even widely deployed models are susceptible to the Chain of Utterances-based (CoU) prompting, jailbreaking closed source LLM-based systems such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT to unethically respond to more than 65% and 73% of harmful queries. We also demonstrate the consistency of the RED-EVAL across 8 open-source LLMs in generating harmful responses in more than 86% of the red-teaming attempts. Next, we propose RED-INSTRUCT--An approach for the safety alignment of LLMs. It constitutes two phases: 1) HARMFULQA data collection: Leveraging CoU prompting, we collect a dataset that consists of 1.9K harmful questions covering a wide range of topics, 9.5K safe and 7.3K harmful conversations from ChatGPT; 2) SAFE-ALIGN: We demonstrate how the conversational dataset can be used for the safety alignment of LLMs by minimizing the negative log-likelihood over helpful responses and penalizing over harmful responses by gradient accent over sample loss. Our model STARLING, a fine-tuned Vicuna-7B, is observed to be more safely aligned when evaluated on RED-EVAL and HHH benchmarks while preserving the utility of the baseline models (TruthfulQA, MMLU, and BBH).

ReMask: A Robust Information-Masking Approach for Domain Counterfactual Generation

Domain shift is a big challenge in NLP, thus, many approaches resort to learning domain-invariant features to mitigate the inference phase domain shift. Such methods, however, fail to leverage the domain-specific nuances relevant to the task at hand. To avoid such drawbacks, domain counterfactual generation aims to transform a text from the source domain to a given target domain. However, due to the limited availability of data, such frequency-based methods often miss and lead to some valid and spurious domain-token associations. Hence, we employ a three-step domain obfuscation approach that involves frequency and attention norm-based masking, to mask domain-specific cues, and unmasking to regain the domain generic context. Our experiments empirically show that the counterfactual samples sourced from our masked text lead to improved domain transfer on 10 out of 12 domain sentiment classification settings, with an average of 2% accuracy improvement over the state-of-the-art for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Further, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by achieving 1.4% average accuracy improvement in the adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) setting. Moreover, our model also shows its domain adaptation efficacy on a large multi-domain intent classification dataset where it attains state-of-the-art results. We release the codes publicly at \url{https://github.com/declare-lab/remask}.

A Review of Deep Learning Techniques for Speech Processing

The field of speech processing has undergone a transformative shift with the advent of deep learning. The use of multiple processing layers has enabled the creation of models capable of extracting intricate features from speech data. This development has paved the way for unparalleled advancements in speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, and emotion recognition, propelling the performance of these tasks to unprecedented heights. The power of deep learning techniques has opened up new avenues for research and innovation in the field of speech processing, with far-reaching implications for a range of industries and applications. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of the key deep learning models and their applications in speech-processing tasks. We begin by tracing the evolution of speech processing research, from early approaches, such as MFCC and HMM, to more recent advances in deep learning architectures, such as CNNs, RNNs, transformers, conformers, and diffusion models. We categorize the approaches and compare their strengths and weaknesses for solving speech-processing tasks. Furthermore, we extensively cover various speech-processing tasks, datasets, and benchmarks used in the literature and describe how different deep-learning networks have been utilized to tackle these tasks. Additionally, we discuss the challenges and future directions of deep learning in speech processing, including the need for more parameter-efficient, interpretable models and the potential of deep learning for multimodal speech processing. By examining the field's evolution, comparing and contrasting different approaches, and highlighting future directions and challenges, we hope to inspire further research in this exciting and rapidly advancing field.

Evaluating Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Approaches on SURE Benchmark for Speech Understanding

Fine-tuning is widely used as the default algorithm for transfer learning from pre-trained models. Parameter inefficiency can however arise when, during transfer learning, all the parameters of a large pre-trained model need to be updated for individual downstream tasks. As the number of parameters grows, fine-tuning is prone to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. In addition, full fine-tuning can become prohibitively expensive when the model is used for many tasks. To mitigate this issue, parameter-efficient transfer learning algorithms, such as adapters and prefix tuning, have been proposed as a way to introduce a few trainable parameters that can be plugged into large pre-trained language models such as BERT, and HuBERT. In this paper, we introduce the Speech UndeRstanding Evaluation (SURE) benchmark for parameter-efficient learning for various speech-processing tasks. Additionally, we introduce a new adapter, ConvAdapter, based on 1D convolution. We show that ConvAdapter outperforms the standard adapters while showing comparable performance against prefix tuning and LoRA with only 0.94% of trainable parameters on some of the task in SURE. We further explore the effectiveness of parameter efficient transfer learning for speech synthesis task such as Text-to-Speech (TTS).