Publications

LLMs and Personalities: Inconsistencies Across Scales

Tosato Tommaso

Mahmood Hegazy

David Lemay

Mohammed Abukalam

This study investigates the application of human psychometric assessments to large language models (LLMs) to examine their consistency and m… (see more)alleability in exhibiting personality traits. We administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) to various LLMs across different model sizes and persona prompts. Our results reveal substantial variability in responses due to question order shuffling, challenging the notion of a stable LLM "personality." Larger models demonstrated more consistent responses, while persona prompts significantly influenced trait scores. Notably, the assistant persona led to more predictable scaling, with larger models exhibiting more socially desirable and less variable traits. In contrast, non-conventional personas displayed unpredictable behaviors, sometimes extending personality trait scores beyond the typical human range. These findings have important implications for understanding LLM behavior under different conditions and reflect on the consequences of scaling.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Behavioral_ML (oral)

openreview.net

LLMs and Personalities: Inconsistencies Across Scales

Tosato Tommaso

Mahmood Hegazy

David Lemay

Mohammed Abukalam

Irina Rish

Guillaume Dumas

This study investigates the application of human psychometric assessments to large language models (LLMs) to examine their consistency and m… (see more)alleability in exhibiting personality traits. We administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) to various LLMs across different model sizes and persona prompts. Our results reveal substantial variability in responses due to question order shuffling, challenging the notion of a stable LLM "personality." Larger models demonstrated more consistent responses, while persona prompts significantly influenced trait scores. Notably, the assistant persona led to more predictable scaling, with larger models exhibiting more socially desirable and less variable traits. In contrast, non-conventional personas displayed unpredictable behaviors, sometimes extending personality trait scores beyond the typical human range. These findings have important implications for understanding LLM behavior under different conditions and reflect on the consequences of scaling.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Behavioral_ML (oral)

openreview.net

Not All LLM Reasoners Are Created Equal

Arian Hosseini

Alessandro Sordoni

Daniel Toyama

Aaron Courville

Rishabh Agarwal

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Sys2-Reasoning (poster)

doi.org

openreview.net

Sample Compression Hypernetworks: From Generalization Bounds to Meta-Learning

Benjamin Leblanc

Mathieu Bazinet

Nathaniel D'Amours

Alexandre Drouin

Pascal Germain

Reconstruction functions are pivotal in sample compression theory, a framework for deriving tight generalization bounds. From a small sample… (see more) of the training set (the compression set) and an optional stream of information (the message), they recover a predictor previously learned from the whole training set. While usually fixed, we propose to learn reconstruction functions. To facilitate the optimization and increase the expressiveness of the message, we derive a new sample compression generalization bound for real-valued messages. From this theoretical analysis, we then present a new hypernetwork architecture that outputs predictors with tight generalization guarantees when trained using an original meta-learning framework. The results of promising preliminary experiments are then reported.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Compression (published)

openreview.net

Sample compression unleashed : New generalization bounds for real valued losses

Mathieu Bazinet

Valentina Zantedeschi

Pascal Germain

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Compression (published)

openreview.net

Sparse Autoencoders Reveal Universal Feature Spaces Across Large Language Models

Michael Lan

Philip Torr

Austin Meek

Ashkan Khakzar

David Scott Krueger

Fazl Barez

2024-10-09

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Spiral volumetric optoacoustic tomography of reduced oxygen saturation in the spinal cord of M83 mouse model of Parkinson's disease.

Benjamin F. Combes

Sandeep Kumar Kalva

Pierre-Louis Benveniste

Agathe Tournant

Man Hoi Law

Joshua Newton

Maik Krüger

Rebecca Z Weber

Inês Dias

Daniela Noain

Xose Luis Dean-Ben

Uwe Konietzko

Christian R. Baumann

Per-Göran Gillberg

Christoph Hock

Roger M. Nitsch

Julien Cohen-Adad

Daniel Razansky

Ruiqing Ni

2024-10-09

European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (published)

doi.org

Towards Interpreting Visual Information Processing in Vision-Language Models

Clement Neo

Luke Ong

Philip Torr

Mor Geva

David Scott Krueger

Fazl Barez

2024-10-09

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

VCR: Visual Caption Restoration

Tianyu Zhang

Suyuchen Wang

Lu Li

Ge Zhang

Perouz Taslakian

Sai Rajeswar

Jie Fu

Bang Liu

Yoshua Bengio

We introduce Visual Caption Restoration (VCR), a novel vision-language task that challenges models to accurately restore partially obscured … (see more)texts using pixel-level hints within images. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images is intrinsically different from common visual elements and natural language due to the need to align the modalities of vision, text, and text embedded in images. While numerous works have integrated text embedded in images into visual question-answering tasks, approaches to these tasks generally rely on optical character recognition or masked language modeling, thus reducing the task to mainly text-based processing. However, text-based processing becomes ineffective in VCR as accurate text restoration depends on the combined information from provided images, context, and subtle cues from the tiny exposed areas of masked texts. We develop a pipeline to generate synthetic images for the VCR task using image-caption pairs, with adjustable caption visibility to control the task difficulty. With this pipeline, we construct a dataset for VCR called VCR-Wiki using images with captions from Wikipedia, comprising 2.11M English and 346K Chinese entities in both easy and hard split variants. Our results reveal that current vision language models significantly lag behind human performance in the VCR task, and merely fine-tuning the models on our dataset does not lead to notable improvements. We release VCR-Wiki and the data construction code to facilitate future research.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Sys2-Reasoning (poster)

doi.org

openreview.net

VinePPO: Accurate Credit Assignment in RL for LLM Mathematical Reasoning

Amirhossein Kazemnejad

Milad Aghajohari

Eva Portelance

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly required to solve complex reasoning tasks, like mathematical problems, that involve multiple r… (see more)easoning steps before feedback is received. Effectively identifying and prioritizing key steps by accurately assigning credit to these intermediate steps is essential for enhancing model performance. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithm for finetuning LLMs, addresses the credit assignment problem by employing value networks to predict the expected cumulative rewards of intermediate states. In this work, we identify significant limitations with this value estimation method. To address this, we propose \methodname that leverages the flexibility of language environments to compute unbiased Monte Carlo-based estimates of the intermediate values. VinePPO consistently outperforms standard PPO, doing so more efficiently and with lower divergence from the reference model. Our findings underscore the critical importance of accurate credit assignment in LLM post-training and present a simple, yet effective solution.

2024-10-09

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/MATH-AI (accepted)

openreview.net