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.
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Misgendering is the act of referring to someone in way that does not reflect their gender identity. Translation systems, including foundation models capable of translation, can produce errors that result in misgendering harms. To measure the extent of such potential harms when translating into and out of English, we introduce a dataset, MiTTenS, covering 26 languages. The dataset is constructed with handcrafted passages that target known failure patterns, longer synthetically generated passages, and natural passages sourced from multiple domains. We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by evaluating both dedicated neural machine translation systems and foundation models, and show that all systems exhibit errors resulting in misgendering harms, even in high resource languages.
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While large, generative, multilingual models are rapidly being developed and deployed, their safety and fairness evaluations primarily hinge on resources collected in the English language and some limited translations. This has been demonstrated to be insufficient, and severely lacking in nuances of unsafe language and stereotypes prevalent in different languages and the geographical pockets they are prevalent in. Gathering these resources, at scale, in varied languages and regions also poses a challenge as it requires expansive sociolinguistic knowledge and can also be prohibitively expensive. We utilize an established methodology of coupling LLM generations with distributed annotations to overcome these gaps and create the resource SeeGULL Multilingual, spanning 20 languages across 23 regions.
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AART: AI-Assisted Red-Teaming with Diverse Data Generation for New LLM-powered Applications
Bhaktipriya Radharapu
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2023) (to appear)
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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
Brennan Saeta
Michele Catasta
Jason Wei
arxiv:2204.02311 (2022)
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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.
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