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The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood. We investigate this aspect by introducing a novel QA reasoning framework, specifically designed to assess the impact of input length. We isolate the effect of input length using multiple versions of the same sample, each being extended with padding of different lengths, types and locations. Our findings show a notable degradation in LLMs' reasoning performance at much shorter input lengths than their technical maximum. We show that the degradation trend appears in every version of our dataset, although at different intensities. Additionally, our study reveals that the traditional metric of next word prediction correlates negatively with performance of LLMs' on our reasoning dataset. We analyse our results and identify failure modes that can serve as useful guides for future research, potentially informing strategies to address the limitations observed in LLMs., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2024

Deep neural networks are normally executed in the forward direction. However, in this work, we identify a vulnerability that enables models to be trained in both directions and on different tasks. Adversaries can exploit this capability to hide rogue models within seemingly legitimate models. In addition, in this work we show that neural networks can be taught to systematically memorize and retrieve specific samples from datasets. Together, these findings expose a novel method in which adversaries can exfiltrate datasets from protected learning environments under the guise of legitimate models. We focus on the data exfiltration attack and show that modern architectures can be used to secretly exfiltrate tens of thousands of samples with high fidelity, high enough to compromise data privacy and even train new models. Moreover, to mitigate this threat we propose a novel approach for detecting infected models., Comment: NDSS24 paper, Transpose Attack, Transposed Model. NDSS version: https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/transpose-attack-stealing-datasets-with-bidirectional-training/

Recent applications of LLMs in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) systems have shown impressive results, but the use of shortcuts, mechanisms triggered by features spuriously correlated to the true label, has emerged as a potential threat to their reliability. We analyze the problem from two angles: LLMs as editors, guided to edit text to mislead LLMs; and LLMs as readers, who answer questions based on the edited text. We introduce a framework that guides an editor to add potential shortcuts-triggers to samples. Using GPT4 as the editor, we find it can successfully edit trigger shortcut in samples that fool LLMs. Analysing LLMs as readers, we observe that even capable LLMs can be deceived using shortcut knowledge. Strikingly, we discover that GPT4 can be deceived by its own edits (15% drop in F1). Our findings highlight inherent vulnerabilities of LLMs to shortcut manipulations. We publish ShortcutQA, a curated dataset generated by our framework for future research., Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2023 Findings

The escalating debate on AI's capabilities warrants developing reliable metrics to assess machine "intelligence". Recently, many anecdotal examples were used to suggest that newer large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM); however, prior work reached conflicting conclusions regarding those abilities. We investigate the extent of LLMs' N-ToM through an extensive evaluation on 6 tasks and find that while LLMs exhibit certain N-ToM abilities, this behavior is far from being robust. We further examine the factors impacting performance on N-ToM tasks and discover that LLMs struggle with adversarial examples, indicating reliance on shallow heuristics rather than robust ToM abilities. We caution against drawing conclusions from anecdotal examples, limited benchmark testing, and using human-designed psychological tests to evaluate models.

Adversarial transferability in black-box scenarios presents a unique challenge: while attackers can employ surrogate models to craft adversarial examples, they lack assurance on whether these examples will successfully compromise the target model. Until now, the prevalent method to ascertain success has been trial and error-testing crafted samples directly on the victim model. This approach, however, risks detection with every attempt, forcing attackers to either perfect their first try or face exposure. Our paper introduces a ranking strategy that refines the transfer attack process, enabling the attacker to estimate the likelihood of success without repeated trials on the victim's system. By leveraging a set of diverse surrogate models, our method can predict transferability of adversarial examples. This strategy can be used to either select the best sample to use in an attack or the best perturbation to apply to a specific sample. Using our strategy, we were able to raise the transferability of adversarial examples from a mere 20% - akin to random selection-up to near upper-bound levels, with some scenarios even witnessing a 100% success rate. This substantial improvement not only sheds light on the shared susceptibilities across diverse architectures but also demonstrates that attackers can forego the detectable trial-and-error tactics raising increasing the threat of surrogate-based attacks.