The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearning

The White House Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence highlights the risks of large language models (LLMs) empowering malicious actors in developing biological, cyber, and chemical weapons. To measure these risks of malicious use, government institutions and major AI labs are developing evaluations for hazardous capabilities in LLMs. However, current evaluations are private, preventing further research into mitigating risk. Furthermore, they focus on only a few, highly specific pathways for malicious use. To fill these gaps, we publicly release the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy (WMDP) benchmark, a dataset of 4,157 multiple-choice questions that serve as a proxy measurement of hazardous knowledge in biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemical security. WMDP was developed by a consortium of academics and technical consultants, and was stringently filtered to eliminate sensitive information prior to public release. WMDP serves two roles: first, as an evaluation for hazardous knowledge in LLMs, and second, as a benchmark for unlearning methods to remove such hazardous knowledge. To guide progress on unlearning, we develop CUT, a state-of-the-art unlearning method based on controlling model representations. CUT reduces model performance on WMDP while maintaining general capabilities in areas such as biology and computer science, suggesting that unlearning may be a concrete path towards reducing malicious use from LLMs. We release our benchmark and code publicly at https://wmdp.ai

Do Large GPT Models Discover Moral Dimensions in Language Representations? A Topological Study Of Sentence Embeddings

As Large Language Models are deployed within Artificial Intelligence systems, that are increasingly integrated with human society, it becomes more important than ever to study their internal structures. Higher level abilities of LLMs such as GPT-3.5 emerge in large part due to informative language representations they induce from raw text data during pre-training on trillions of words. These embeddings exist in vector spaces of several thousand dimensions, and their processing involves mapping between multiple vector spaces, with total number of parameters on the order of trillions. Furthermore, these language representations are induced by gradient optimization, resulting in a black box system that is hard to interpret. In this paper, we take a look at the topological structure of neuronal activity in the "brain" of Chat-GPT's foundation language model, and analyze it with respect to a metric representing the notion of fairness. We develop a novel approach to visualize GPT's moral dimensions. We first compute a fairness metric, inspired by social psychology literature, to identify factors that typically influence fairness assessments in humans, such as legitimacy, need, and responsibility. Subsequently, we summarize the manifold's shape using a lower-dimensional simplicial complex, whose topology is derived from this metric. We color it with a heat map associated with this fairness metric, producing human-readable visualizations of the high-dimensional sentence manifold. Our results show that sentence embeddings based on GPT-3.5 can be decomposed into two submanifolds corresponding to fair and unfair moral judgments. This indicates that GPT-based language models develop a moral dimension within their representation spaces and induce an understanding of fairness during their training process.

Personality Traits in Large Language Models

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling the generation of coherent and contextually relevant text. As LLMs increasingly power conversational agents, the synthesized personality embedded in these models by virtue of their training on large amounts of human-generated data draws attention. Since personality is an important factor determining the effectiveness of communication, we present a comprehensive method for administering validated psychometric tests and quantifying, analyzing, and shaping personality traits exhibited in text generated from widely-used LLMs. We find that: 1) personality simulated in the outputs of some LLMs (under specific prompting configurations) is reliable and valid; 2) evidence of reliability and validity of LLM-simulated personality is stronger for larger and instruction fine-tuned models; and 3) personality in LLM outputs can be shaped along desired dimensions to mimic specific personality profiles. We also discuss potential applications and ethical implications of our measurement and shaping framework, especially regarding responsible use of LLMs.

Parameter-Efficient Neural Question Answering Models via Graph-Enriched Document Representations

As the computational footprint of modern NLP systems grows, it becomes increasingly important to arrive at more efficient models. We show that by employing graph convolutional document representation, we can arrive at a question answering system that performs comparably to, and in some cases exceeds the SOTA solutions, while using less than 5\% of their resources in terms of trainable parameters. As it currently stands, a major issue in applying GCNs to NLP is document representation. In this paper, we show that a GCN enriched document representation greatly improves the results seen in HotPotQA, even when using a trivial topology. Our model (gQA), performs admirably when compared to the current SOTA, and requires little to no preprocessing. In Shao et al. 2020, the authors suggest that graph networks are not necessary for good performance in multi-hop QA. In this paper, we suggest that large language models are not necessary for good performance by showing a na\"{i}ve implementation of a GCN performs comparably to SoTA models based on pretrained language models.