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Kevin Robinson

Kevin Robinson

At Google Research, I'm a research engineer working on evaluations of language models and NLP systems. At other times in my career I've worked as a special education teacher, as a software engineer building visualization and analytics systems, and a researcher in K12 computer science education.
Authored Publications
Google Publications
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    Preview abstract Adversarial testing of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their safe and responsible deployment. We introduce a novel approach for automated generation of adversarial evaluation datasets to test the safety of LLM generations on new downstream applications. We call it AI-assisted Red-Teaming (AART) - an automated alternative to current manual red-teaming efforts. AART offers a data generation and augmentation pipeline of reusable and customizable recipes that reduce human effort significantly and enable integration of adversarial testing earlier in new product development. AART generates evaluation datasets with high diversity of content characteristics critical for effective adversarial testing (e.g. sensitive and harmful concepts, specific to a wide range of cultural and geographic regions and application scenarios). The data generation is steered by AI-assisted recipes to define, scope and prioritize diversity within the application context. This feeds into a structured LLM-generation process that scales up evaluation priorities. Compared to some state-of-the-art tools, AART shows promising results in terms of concept coverage and data quality. View details
    PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
    Aakanksha Chowdhery
    Sharan Narang
    Jacob Devlin
    Maarten Bosma
    Hyung Won Chung
    Sebastian Gehrmann
    Parker Schuh
    Sasha Tsvyashchenko
    Abhishek Rao
    Yi Tay
    Noam Shazeer
    Nan Du
    Reiner Pope
    James Bradbury
    Guy Gur-Ari
    Toju Duke
    Henryk Michalewski
    Xavier Garcia
    Liam Fedus
    David Luan
    Barret Zoph
    Ryan Sepassi
    David Dohan
    Shivani Agrawal
    Mark Omernick
    Marie Pellat
    Aitor Lewkowycz
    Erica Moreira
    Rewon Child
    Oleksandr Polozov
    Zongwei Zhou
    Michele Catasta
    Jason Wei
    arxiv:2204.02311 (2022)
    Preview abstract Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning, which drastically reduces the number of task-specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model PaLM. We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly efficient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued benefits of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the finetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A significant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies. View details
    Sparsely Activated Language Models are Efficient In-Context Learners
    Barret Richard Zoph
    Dmitry (Dima) Lepikhin
    Emma Wang
    Kun Zhang
    Liam B. Fedus
    Maarten Paul Bosma
    Marie Pellat
    Maxim Krikun
    Nan Du
    Simon Tong
    Tao Wang
    Toju Duke
    Yuanzhong Xu
    Zongwei Zhou
    (2022)
    Preview abstract Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong performance on few-shot learning. However, training these large dense models require significant amounts of computing resources. In this paper, we develop a family of sparsely activated mixture-of-expert language models named \glam (\textbf{G}eneralist \textbf{La}nguage \textbf{M}odel), which can have many more parameters but require significant less training cost than dense models. The largest \glam has 1.2 trillion parameters, which is approximately 7x larger than GPT-3 but can be trained more efficiently. With only 1/3 of energy consumption to train GPT-3, \glam achieves better overall performance on 29 zero-shot and one-shot NLP tasks. For example, \glam gets 75.0\% one-shot exact match accuracy on the TriviaQA test server, a significant improvement over 68.0\% obtained by GPT-3. View details
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