On the Risk of Misinformation Pollution with Large Language Models

In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the potential misuse of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating credible-sounding misinformation and its subsequent impact on information-intensive applications, particularly Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems. We establish a threat model and simulate potential misuse scenarios, both unintentional and intentional, to assess the extent to which LLMs can be utilized to produce misinformation. Our study reveals that LLMs can act as effective misinformation generators, leading to a significant degradation in the performance of ODQA systems. To mitigate the harm caused by LLM-generated misinformation, we explore three defense strategies: prompting, misinformation detection, and majority voting. While initial results show promising trends for these defensive strategies, much more work needs to be done to address the challenge of misinformation pollution. Our work highlights the need for further research and interdisciplinary collaboration to address LLM-generated misinformation and to promote responsible use of LLMs.

GreenPLM: Cross-lingual pre-trained language models conversion with (almost) no cost

While large pre-trained models have transformed the field of natural language processing (NLP), the high training cost and low cross-lingual availability of such models prevent the new advances from being equally shared by users across all languages, especially the less spoken ones. To promote equal opportunities for all language speakers in NLP research and to reduce energy consumption for sustainability, this study proposes an effective and energy-efficient framework GreenPLM that uses bilingual lexicons to directly translate language models of one language into other languages at (almost) no additional cost. We validate this approach in 18 languages and show that this framework is comparable to, if not better than, other heuristics trained with high cost. In addition, when given a low computational cost (2.5%), the framework outperforms the original monolingual language models in six out of seven tested languages. This approach can be easily implemented, and we will release language models in 50 languages translated from English soon.