Against The Achilles' Heel: A Survey on Red Teaming for Generative Models

Generative models are rapidly gaining popularity and being integrated into everyday applications, raising concerns over their safety issues as various vulnerabilities are exposed. Faced with the problem, the field of red teaming is experiencing fast-paced growth, which highlights the need for a comprehensive organization covering the entire pipeline and addressing emerging topics for the community. Our extensive survey, which examines over 120 papers, introduces a taxonomy of fine-grained attack strategies grounded in the inherent capabilities of language models. Additionally, we have developed the searcher framework that unifies various automatic red teaming approaches. Moreover, our survey covers novel areas including multimodal attacks and defenses, risks around multilingual models, overkill of harmless queries, and safety of downstream applications. We hope this survey can provide a systematic perspective on the field and unlock new areas of research.

A Chinese Dataset for Evaluating the Safeguards in Large Language Models

Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks when LLMs are deployed. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of the risks posed by LLMs, as well as corresponding prompts that can be used to examine the safety mechanisms of LLMs. However, the focus has been almost exclusively on English, and little has been explored for other languages. Here we aim to bridge this gap. We first introduce a dataset for the safety evaluation of Chinese LLMs, and then extend it to two other scenarios that can be used to better identify false negative and false positive examples in terms of risky prompt rejections. We further present a set of fine-grained safety assessment criteria for each risk type, facilitating both manual annotation and automatic evaluation in terms of LLM response harmfulness. Our experiments on five LLMs show that region-specific risks are the prevalent type of risk, presenting the major issue with all Chinese LLMs we experimented with. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

COVID-SEE: Scientific Evidence Explorer for COVID-19 Related Research

We present COVID-SEE, a system for medical literature discovery based on the concept of information exploration, which builds on several distinct text analysis and natural language processing methods to structure and organise information in publications, and augments search by providing a visual overview supporting exploration of a collection to identify key articles of interest. We developed this system over COVID-19 literature to help medical professionals and researchers explore the literature evidence, and improve findability of relevant information. COVID-SEE is available at http://covid-see.com.

Improving Chemical Named Entity Recognition in Patents with Contextualized Word Embeddings

Chemical patents are an important resource for chemical information. However, few chemical Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems have been evaluated on patent documents, due in part to their structural and linguistic complexity. In this paper, we explore the NER performance of a BiLSTM-CRF model utilising pre-trained word embeddings, character-level word representations and contextualized ELMo word representations for chemical patents. We compare word embeddings pre-trained on biomedical and chemical patent corpora. The effect of tokenizers optimized for the chemical domain on NER performance in chemical patents is also explored. The results on two patent corpora show that contextualized word representations generated from ELMo substantially improve chemical NER performance w.r.t. the current state-of-the-art. We also show that domain-specific resources such as word embeddings trained on chemical patents and chemical-specific tokenizers have a positive impact on NER performance.

A bag-of-concepts model improves relation extraction in a narrow knowledge domain with limited data

This paper focuses on a traditional relation extraction task in the context of limited annotated data and a narrow knowledge domain. We explore this task with a clinical corpus consisting of 200 breast cancer follow-up treatment letters in which 16 distinct types of relations are annotated. We experiment with an approach to extracting typed relations called window-bounded co-occurrence (WBC), which uses an adjustable context window around entity mentions of a relevant type, and compare its performance with a more typical intra-sentential co-occurrence baseline. We further introduce a new bag-of-concepts (BoC) approach to feature engineering based on the state-of-the-art word embeddings and word synonyms. We demonstrate the competitiveness of BoC by comparing with methods of higher complexity, and explore its effectiveness on this small dataset.

Comparing CNN and LSTM character-level embeddings in BiLSTM-CRF models for chemical and disease named entity recognition

We compare the use of LSTM-based and CNN-based character-level word embeddings in BiLSTM-CRF models to approach chemical and disease named entity recognition (NER) tasks. Empirical results over the BioCreative V CDR corpus show that the use of either type of character-level word embeddings in conjunction with the BiLSTM-CRF models leads to comparable state-of-the-art performance. However, the models using CNN-based character-level word embeddings have a computational performance advantage, increasing training time over word-based models by 25% while the LSTM-based character-level word embeddings more than double the required training time.