Xing Xie

Qinlin Zhao, Jindong Wang, Yixuan Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as agents to complete different tasks, such as personal assistance or event planning. While most of the work has focused on cooperation and collaboration between agents, little work explores competition, another important mechanism that promotes the development of society and economy. In this paper, we seek to examine the competition dynamics in LLM-based agents. We first propose a general framework for studying the competition between agents. Then, we implement a practical competitive environment using GPT-4 to simulate a virtual town with two types of agents, restaurant agents and customer agents. Specifically, the restaurant agents compete with each other to attract more customers, where competition encourages them to transform, such as cultivating new operating strategies. Simulation experiments reveal several interesting findings at the micro and macro levels, which align well with existing market and sociological theories. We hope that the framework and environment can be a promising testbed to study competition that fosters understanding of society. Code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/competeai.

Zihan Luo, Xiran Song, Hong Huang et al.

Improving the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is an active research topic. As a common data structure in many real-world domains, understanding graph data is a crucial part of advancing general intelligence. To this end, we propose a dynamic benchmark named GraphInstruct in this paper, which comprehensively includes 21 classical graph reasoning tasks, providing diverse graph generation pipelines and detailed intermediate reasoning steps for each sample. Based on GraphInstruct, we develop GraphSolver via efficient instruction-tuning, which demonstrates prominent graph understanding capability compared to other open-sourced LLMs. To further endow LLMs with multi-step graph reasoning capability, we propose a label-mask training strategy and build GraphSolver+, which leverages masked supervision on intermediate reasoning tokens to emphasize crucial node-identification signals. As one of the pioneering efforts to enhance the graph understanding and reasoning abilities of LLMs, extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of GraphSolver and GraphSolver+ over other LLMs. We sincerely hope GraphInstruct will facilitate further research on applying LLMs to graph-structured data. Our code and data are released publicly at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/GraphInstruct.

Linyi Yang, Shuibai Zhang, Zhuohao Yu et al. · pku

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit emerging in-context learning abilities through prompt engineering. The recent progress in large-scale generative models has further expanded their use in real-world language applications. However, the critical challenge of improving the generalizability and factuality of LLMs in natural language understanding and question answering remains under-explored. While previous in-context learning research has focused on enhancing models to adhere to users' specific instructions and quality expectations, and to avoid undesired outputs, little to no work has explored the use of task-Specific fine-tuned Language Models (SLMs) to improve LLMs' in-context learning during the inference stage. Our primary contribution is the establishment of a simple yet effective framework that enhances the reliability of LLMs as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution data, 2) elucidates how LLMs benefit from discriminative models, and 3) minimizes hallucinations in generative tasks. Using our proposed plug-in method, enhanced versions of Llama 2 and ChatGPT surpass their original versions regarding generalizability and factuality. We offer a comprehensive suite of resources, including 16 curated datasets, prompts, model checkpoints, and LLM outputs across 9 distinct tasks. The code and data are released at: https://github.com/YangLinyi/Supervised-Knowledge-Makes-Large-Language-Models-Better-In-context-Learners. Our empirical analysis sheds light on the advantages of incorporating discriminative models into LLMs and highlights the potential of our methodology in fostering more reliable LLMs.

Cheng Li, Jindong Wang, Yixuan Zhang et al.

Emotion significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in various tasks, it remains unclear whether they truly comprehend emotions. This paper aims to address this gap by incorporating psychological theories to gain a holistic understanding of emotions in generative AI models. Specifically, we propose three approaches: 1) EmotionPrompt to enhance AI model performance, 2) EmotionAttack to impair AI model performance, and 3) EmotionDecode to explain the effects of emotional stimuli, both benign and malignant. Through extensive experiments involving language and multi-modal models on semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and generation tasks, we demonstrate that both textual and visual EmotionPrompt can boost the performance of AI models while EmotionAttack can hinder it. Additionally, EmotionDecode reveals that AI models can comprehend emotional stimuli akin to the mechanism of dopamine in the human brain. Our work heralds a novel avenue for exploring psychology to enhance our understanding of generative AI models.

Jiyan He, Weitao Feng, Yaosen Min et al. · microsoft-research

The expanding application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in scientific fields presents unprecedented opportunities for discovery and innovation. However, this growth is not without risks. AI models in science, if misused, can amplify risks like creation of harmful substances, or circumvention of established regulations. In this study, we aim to raise awareness of the dangers of AI misuse in science, and call for responsible AI development and use in this domain. We first itemize the risks posed by AI in scientific contexts, then demonstrate the risks by highlighting real-world examples of misuse in chemical science. These instances underscore the need for effective risk management strategies. In response, we propose a system called SciGuard to control misuse risks for AI models in science. We also propose a red-teaming benchmark SciMT-Safety to assess the safety of different systems. Our proposed SciGuard shows the least harmful impact in the assessment without compromising performance in benign tests. Finally, we highlight the need for a multidisciplinary and collaborative effort to ensure the safe and ethical use of AI models in science. We hope that our study can spark productive discussions on using AI ethically in science among researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the public, to maximize benefits and minimize the risks of misuse.

Hao Chen, Bhiksha Raj, Xing Xie et al.

Large foundation models (LFMs) are claiming incredible performances. Yet great concerns have been raised about their mythic and uninterpreted potentials not only in machine learning, but also in various other disciplines. In this position paper, we propose to identify a neglected issue deeply rooted in LFMs: Catastrophic Inheritance, describing the weaknesses and limitations inherited from biased large-scale pre-training data to behaviors of LFMs on the downstream tasks, including samples that are corrupted, long-tailed, noisy, out-of-distributed, to name a few. Such inheritance can potentially cause catastrophes to downstream applications, such as bias, lack of generalization, deteriorated performance, security vulnerability, privacy leakage, and value misalignment. We discuss the challenges behind this issue and propose UIM, a framework to Understand the catastrophic inheritance of LFMs from both pre-training and downstream adaptation, Interpret the implications of catastrophic inheritance on downstream tasks, and how to Mitigate it. UIM aims to unite both the machine learning and social sciences communities for more responsible and promising AI development and deployment.