Can Prompts Rewind Time for LLMs? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Prompted Knowledge CutoffsXin Gao, Ruiyi Zhang, Daniel Du et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for temporal prediction, but their reliance on pretraining data raises contamination concerns, as accurate predictions on pre-cutoff test data may reflect memorization rather than reasoning, leading to an overestimation of their generalization capability. With the recent emergence of prompting-based unlearning techniques, a natural question arises: Can LLMs be prompted to simulate an earlier knowledge cutoff? In this work, we investigate the capability of prompting to simulate earlier knowledge cutoff in LLMs. We construct three evaluation datasets to assess the extent to which LLMs can forget (1) direct factual knowledge, (2) semantic shifts, and (3) causally related knowledge. Results demonstrate that while prompt-based simulated knowledge cutoffs show effectiveness when directly queried with the information after that date, they struggle to induce forgetting when the forgotten content is not directly asked but causally related to the query. These findings highlight the need for more rigorous evaluation settings when applying LLMs for temporal prediction tasks. The full dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/gxx27/time_unlearn.
4.4LGSep 20, 2021
Deep Spatio-temporal Sparse Decomposition for Trend Prediction and Anomaly Detection in Cardiac Electrical ConductionXinyu Zhao, Hao Yan, Zhiyong Hu et al.
Electrical conduction among cardiac tissue is commonly modeled with partial differential equations, i.e., reaction-diffusion equation, where the reaction term describes cellular stimulation and diffusion term describes electrical propagation. Detecting and identifying of cardiac cells that produce abnormal electrical impulses in such nonlinear dynamic systems are important for efficient treatment and planning. To model the nonlinear dynamics, simulation has been widely used in both cardiac research and clinical study to investigate cardiac disease mechanisms and develop new treatment designs. However, existing cardiac models have a great level of complexity, and the simulation is often time-consuming. We propose a deep spatio-temporal sparse decomposition (DSTSD) approach to bypass the time-consuming cardiac partial differential equations with the deep spatio-temporal model and detect the time and location of the anomaly (i.e., malfunctioning cardiac cells). This approach is validated from the data set generated from the Courtemanche-Ramirez-Nattel (CRN) model, which is widely used to model the propagation of the transmembrane potential across the cross neuron membrane. The proposed DSTSD achieved the best accuracy in terms of spatio-temporal mean trend prediction and anomaly detection.