Pavel Dolin

Divij Handa, Pavel Dolin, Shrinidhi Kumbhar et al.

Reasoning about Actions and Change (RAC) has historically played a pivotal role in solving foundational AI problems, such as the frame problem. It has driven advancements in AI fields, such as non-monotonic and commonsense reasoning. RAC remains crucial for AI systems that operate in dynamic environments, engage in interactive scenarios, or rely on commonsense reasoning. Despite substantial advances made by Large Language Models (LLMs) in various AI domains, their performance in RAC remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a new diagnostic benchmark, ActionReasoningBench, which encompasses 8 domains and includes questions for up to 19 action sequences. This benchmark rigorously evaluates LLMs across six key RAC dimensions: Fluent Tracking, State Tracking, Action Executability, Effects of Actions, Numerical RAC, and Composite Questions. LLMs demonstrate average accuracy rates of 73.55%, 65.63%, 58.73%, and 62.38% on the former four dimensions, which are frequently discussed in RAC literature. However, the performance on the latter two dimensions, which introduce complex and novel reasoning questions, the average performance of LLMs is lowered to 33.16% and 51.19%, respectively, reflecting a 17.9% performance decline. We also introduce new ramification constraints to capture the indirect effects of actions, providing deeper insights into RAC challenges. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, including both open-source and commercial models, reveals challenges across all RAC dimensions, particularly in handling ramifications, with GPT-4o failing to solve any question and o1-preview achieving a score of only 18.4%.

Neeraj Varshney, Pavel Dolin, Agastya Seth et al. · amazon-science

As Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly pivotal role in natural language processing applications, their safety concerns become critical areas of NLP research. This paper presents Safety and Over-Defensiveness Evaluation (SODE) benchmark: a collection of diverse safe and unsafe prompts with carefully designed evaluation methods that facilitate systematic evaluation, comparison, and analysis over 'safety' and 'over-defensiveness.' With SODE, we study a variety of LLM defense strategies over multiple state-of-the-art LLMs, which reveals several interesting and important findings, such as (a) the widely popular 'self-checking' techniques indeed improve the safety against unsafe inputs, but this comes at the cost of extreme over-defensiveness on the safe inputs, (b) providing a safety instruction along with in-context exemplars (of both safe and unsafe inputs) consistently improves safety and also mitigates undue over-defensiveness of the models, (c) providing contextual knowledge easily breaks the safety guardrails and makes the models more vulnerable to generating unsafe responses. Overall, our work reveals numerous such critical findings that we believe will pave the way and facilitate further research in improving the safety of LLMs.

Pavel Dolin, Luc d'Hauthuille, Andrea Vattani

Twitch chats pose a unique problem in natural language understanding due to a large presence of neologisms, specifically emotes. There are a total of 8.06 million emotes, over 400k of which were used in the week studied. There is virtually no information on the meaning or sentiment of emotes, and with a constant influx of new emotes and drift in their frequencies, it becomes impossible to maintain an updated manually-labeled dataset. Our paper makes a two fold contribution. First we establish a new baseline for sentiment analysis on Twitch data, outperforming the previous supervised benchmark by 7.9% points. Secondly, we introduce a simple but powerful unsupervised framework based on word embeddings and k-NN to enrich existing models with out-of-vocabulary knowledge. This framework allows us to auto-generate a pseudo-dictionary of emotes and we show that we can nearly match the supervised benchmark above even when injecting such emote knowledge into sentiment classifiers trained on extraneous datasets such as movie reviews or Twitter.