Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed machine learning but raised significant legal concerns due to their potential to produce text that infringes on copyrights, resulting in several high-profile lawsuits. The legal landscape is struggling to keep pace with these rapid advancements, with ongoing debates about whether generated text might plagiarize copyrighted materials. Current LLMs may infringe on copyrights or overly restrict non-copyrighted texts, leading to these challenges: (i) the need for a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to assess copyright compliance from multiple aspects; (ii) evaluating robustness against safeguard bypassing attacks; and (iii) developing effective defenses targeted against the generation of copyrighted text.To tackle these challenges, we introduce a curated dataset to evaluate methods, test attack strategies, and propose a lightweight, real-time defense mechanism to prevent the generation of copyrighted text, ensuring the safe and lawful use of LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that current LLMs frequently output copyrighted text, and that jailbreaking attacks can significantly increase the volume of copyrighted output. Our proposed defense mechanism substantially reduces the volume of copyrighted text generated by LLMs by effectively refusing malicious requests.

This survey provides an in-depth analysis of knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs), highlighting the complex challenges they encounter when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. Our focus is on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-memory conflict. These conflicts can significantly impact the trustworthiness and performance of LLMs, especially in real-world applications where noise and misinformation are common. By categorizing these conflicts, exploring the causes, examining the behaviors of LLMs under such conflicts, and reviewing available solutions, this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs, thereby serving as a valuable resource for advancing research in this evolving area.

Chain of thought (CoT) is a reasoning framework that can enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex inference tasks. In particular, among various studies related to CoT, multi-path inference stands out as a simple yet effective improvement. However, there is no optimal setting for the number of inference paths. Therefore, we have to increase the number of inference paths to obtain better results, which in turn increases the inference cost. To address this limitation, we can utilize question-related role templates to guide LLMs into relevant roles, thereby increasing the possibility of correct inferences for each path and further reducing dependence on the number of inference paths while improving reasoning accuracy. However, placing LLMs into specific roles may reduce their reasoning diversity and performance on a few tasks where role dependence is low. To alleviate the excessive immersion of the LLM into a specific role, we propose Nash CoT by constructing a competitive system on each path that balances the generation from role-specific LLMs’ and the general LLMs’ generation, thereby ensuring both effective role adoption and diversity in LLM generation further maintaining the performance of multi-path inference while reducing the requirement of the number of inference paths. We evaluate Nash CoT across various inference tasks, including Arabic Reasoning, Commonsense Question Answering, and Symbolic Inference, achieving results that are comparable to or better than those of multi-path CoT with the equal number of inference paths.

The Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) task involves retrieving and subsequently generating answers from fine-grained relevant passages within a database. Current systems leverage Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to model the relationship between questions and passages. However, the diversity in surface form expressions can hinder the model’s ability to capture accurate correlations, especially within complex contexts. Therefore, we utilize Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to assist the model in understanding complex semantic information. We introduce a method known as Graph-as-Token (GST) to incorporate AMRs into PLMs. Results from Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQ) demonstrate that our GST method can significantly improve performance, resulting in up to 2.44/3.17 Exact Match score improvements on NQ/TQ respectively. Furthermore, our method enhances robustness and outperforms alternative Graph Neural Network (GNN) methods for integrating AMRs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ semantic graphs in ODQA.

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) systems necessitate a reader model capable of generating answers by simultaneously referring to multiple passages. Although representative models like Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) have been proposed to address this challenge, these systems can inadvertently rely on spurious features instead of genuine causal relationships between the question and the passages to generate answers. To counter this problem, we introduce the Rational Fusion-in-Decoder (RFiD) model. Our model leverages the encoders of FiD to differentiate between causal relationships and spurious features, subsequently guiding the decoder to generate answers informed by this discernment. Experimental results on two ODQA datasets, Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQ), demonstrate that our model surpasses previous methods, achieving improvements of up to 1.5 and 0.7 in Exact Match scores on NQ, and exhibits an enhanced ability to identify causal relationships.

The Transformer architecture is crucial for numerous AI models, but it still faces challenges in long-range language modeling. Though several specific transformer architectures have been designed to tackle issues of long-range dependencies, existing methods like Transformer-XL are plagued by a high percentage of ineffective memories. In this study, we present a plug-and-play strategy, known as TRAining-free Memory Selection (TRAMS), that selects tokens participating in attention calculation based on one simple metric. This strategy allows us to keep tokens that are likely to have a high attention score with the current queries and ignore the other ones. We have tested our approach on the word-level benchmark (WikiText-103) and the character-level benchmark (enwik8), and the results indicate an improvement without having additional training or adding additional parameters.

Recent work has investigated the interesting question using pre-trained language models (PLMs) as knowledge bases for answering open questions. However, existing work is limited in using small benchmarks with high test-train overlaps. We construct a new dataset of closed-book QA using SQuAD, and investigate the performance of BART. Experiments show that it is challenging for BART to remember training facts in high precision, and also challenging to answer closed-book questions even if relevant knowledge is retained. Some promising directions are found, including decoupling the knowledge memorizing process and the QA finetune process, forcing the model to recall relevant knowledge when question answering.

In this paper, we present SemEval-2020 Task 4, Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE), which includes three subtasks, aiming to evaluate whether a system can distinguish a natural language statement that makes sense to humans from one that does not, and provide the reasons. Specifically, in our first subtask, the participating systems are required to choose from two natural language statements of similar wording the one that makes sense and the one does not. The second subtask additionally asks a system to select the key reason from three options why a given statement does not make sense. In the third subtask, a participating system needs to generate the reason automatically. 39 teams submitted their valid systems to at least one subtask. For Subtask A and Subtask B, top-performing teams have achieved results closed to human performance. However, for Subtask C, there is still a considerable gap between system and human performance. The dataset used in our task can be found at https://github.com/wangcunxiang/SemEval2020-Task4-Commonsense-Validation-and-Explanation.

Introducing common sense to natural language understanding systems has received increasing research attention. It remains a fundamental question on how to evaluate whether a system has the sense-making capability. Existing benchmarks measure common sense knowledge indirectly or without reasoning. In this paper, we release a benchmark to directly test whether a system can differentiate natural language statements that make sense from those that do not make sense. In addition, a system is asked to identify the most crucial reason why a statement does not make sense. We evaluate models trained over large-scale language modeling tasks as well as human performance, showing that there are different challenges for system sense-making.