Large language models (LLMs) suffer from serious unfaithful chain-of-thought (CoT) issues. Previous work attempts to measure and explain it but lacks in-depth analysis within CoTs and does not consider the interactions among all reasoning components jointly. In this paper, we first study the CoT faithfulness issue at the granularity of CoT steps, identify two reasoning paradigms: centralized reasoning and distributed reasoning, and find their relationship with faithfulness. Subsequently, we conduct a joint analysis of the causal relevance among the context, CoT, and answer during reasoning. The result proves that, when the LLM predicts answers, it can recall correct information missing in the CoT from the context, leading to unfaithfulness issues. Finally, we propose the inferential bridging method to mitigate this issue, in which we use the attribution method to recall information as hints for CoT generation and filter out noisy CoTs based on their semantic consistency and attribution scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively alleviates the unfaithful CoT problem.
This paper explores methods for verifying the properties of Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), focusing on robustness against adversarial attacks. Despite their lower computational and memory needs, BNNs, like their full-precision counterparts, are also sensitive to input perturbations. Established methods for solving this problem are predominantly based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming techniques, which are characterized by NP complexity and often face scalability issues. We introduce an alternative approach using Semidefinite Programming relaxations derived from sparse Polynomial Optimization. Our approach, compatible with continuous input space, not only mitigates numerical issues associated with floating-point calculations but also enhances verification scalability through the strategic use of tighter first-order semidefinite relaxations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in verifying robustness against both $\|.\|_\infty$ and $\|.\|_2$-based adversarial attacks.
Large language models (LLMs) store extensive factual knowledge, but the mechanisms behind how they store and express this knowledge remain unclear. The Knowledge Neuron (KN) thesis is a prominent theory for explaining these mechanisms. This theory is based on the knowledge localization (KL) assumption, which suggests that a fact can be localized to a few knowledge storage units, namely knowledge neurons. However, this assumption may be overly strong regarding knowledge storage and neglects knowledge expression mechanisms. Thus, we re-examine the KL assumption and confirm the existence of facts that do not adhere to it from both statistical and knowledge modification perspectives. Furthermore, we propose the Query Localization (QL) assumption. (1) Query-KN Mapping: The localization results are associated with the query rather than the fact. (2) Dynamic KN Selection: The attention module contributes to the selection of KNs for answering a query. Based on this, we further propose the Consistency-Aware KN modification method, which improves the performance of knowledge modification. We conduct 39 sets of experiments, along with additional visualization experiments, to rigorously validate our conclusions.
Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we investigate the compositionality of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we construct a new dataset \textsc{MathTrap}\footnotemark[3] by introducing carefully designed logical traps into the problem descriptions of MATH and GSM8k. Since problems with logical flaws are quite rare in the real world, these represent ``unseen'' cases to LLMs. Solving these requires the models to systematically compose (1) the mathematical knowledge involved in the original problems with (2) knowledge related to the introduced traps. Our experiments show that while LLMs possess both components of requisite knowledge, they do not \textbf{spontaneously} combine them to handle these novel cases. We explore several methods to mitigate this deficiency, such as natural language prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and fine-tuning. We find that LLMs' performance can be \textbf{passively} improved through the above external intervention. Overall, systematic compositionality remains an open challenge for large language models.
To address the issue of insufficient knowledge and the tendency to generate hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous studies have endeavored to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, all these methods are evaluated on conventional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) with complete KGs, where the factual triples involved in each question are entirely covered by the given KG. In this situation, LLM mainly acts as an agent to find answer entities by exploring the KG, rather than effectively integrating internal and external knowledge sources. However, in real-world scenarios, KGs are often incomplete to cover all the knowledge required to answer questions. To simulate real-world scenarios and evaluate the ability of LLMs to integrate internal and external knowledge, in this paper, we propose leveraging LLMs for QA under Incomplete Knowledge Graph (IKGQA), where the given KG doesn't include all the factual triples involved in each question. To handle IKGQA, we propose a training-free method called Generate-on-Graph (GoG) that can generate new factual triples while exploring on KGs. Specifically, we propose a selecting-generating-answering framework, which not only treat the LLM as an agent to explore on KGs, but also treat it as a KG to generate new facts based on the explored subgraph and its inherent knowledge. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our GoG can solve IKGQA to a certain extent, while almost all previous methods cannot perform well on IKGQA.
Wireless communication is rapidly evolving, and future wireless communications (6G and beyond) will be more heterogeneous, multi-layered, and complex, which poses challenges to traditional communications. Adaptive technologies in traditional communication systems respond to environmental changes by modifying system parameters and structures on their own and are not flexible and agile enough to satisfy requirements in future communications. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel self-evolving communication framework, which consists of three layers: data layer, information layer, and knowledge layer. The first two layers allow communication systems to sense environments, fuse data, and generate a knowledge base for the knowledge layer. When dealing with a variety of application scenarios and environments, the generated knowledge is subsequently fed back to the first two layers for communication in practical application scenarios to obtain self-evolving ability and enhance the robustness of the system. In this paper, we first highlight the limitations of current adaptive communication systems and the need for intelligence, automation, and self-evolution in future wireless communications. We overview the development of self-evolving technologies and conceive the concept of self-evolving communications with its hypothetical architecture. To demonstrate the power of self-evolving modules, we compare the performances of a communication system with and without evolution. We then provide some potential techniques that enable self-evolving communications and challenges in implementing them.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities of in-context learning (ICL), adapting swiftly to new tasks with only few-shot demonstrations. However, current few-shot methods heavily depend on high-quality, query-specific demos, which are often lacking. When faced with out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries, methods that rely on hand-crafted demos or external retrievers might fail. To bridge the gap between limited demos and OOD queries, we propose Self-Demos, a novel prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability in LLMs by query-aware demo generation. The generated demos strategically interpolate between existing demos and the given query, transforming the query from OOD to ID. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we manually constructed OOD-Toolset, a dataset in the tool-using scenario with over 300 real-world APIs and 1000 instances, each consisting of three tool-use cases as demos and an OOD query. Thorough experiments on our dataset and two public math benchmarks have shown that our method can outperform state-of-the-art baselines in the OOD setting. Moreover, we conduct a range of analyses to validate Self-Demos's generalization and provide more insights.
Many attack techniques have been proposed to explore the vulnerability of DNNs and further help to improve their robustness. Despite the significant progress made recently, existing black-box attack methods still suffer from unsatisfactory performance due to the vast number of queries needed to optimize desired perturbations. Besides, the other critical challenge is that adversarial examples built in a noise-adding manner are abnormal and struggle to successfully attack robust models, whose robustness is enhanced by adversarial training against small perturbations. There is no doubt that these two issues mentioned above will significantly increase the risk of exposure and result in a failure to dig deeply into the vulnerability of DNNs. Hence, it is necessary to evaluate DNNs' fragility sufficiently under query-limited settings in a non-additional way. In this paper, we propose the Spatial Transform Black-box Attack (STBA), a novel framework to craft formidable adversarial examples in the query-limited scenario. Specifically, STBA introduces a flow field to the high-frequency part of clean images to generate adversarial examples and adopts the following two processes to enhance their naturalness and significantly improve the query efficiency: a) we apply an estimated flow field to the high-frequency part of clean images to generate adversarial examples instead of introducing external noise to the benign image, and b) we leverage an efficient gradient estimation method based on a batch of samples to optimize such an ideal flow field under query-limited settings. Compared to existing score-based black-box baselines, extensive experiments indicated that STBA could effectively improve the imperceptibility of the adversarial examples and remarkably boost the attack success rate under query-limited settings.
Retrieval-Augmented-Generation and Gener-ation-Augmented-Generation have been proposed to enhance the knowledge required for question answering over Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the former depends on external resources, and both require incorporating the explicit documents into the context, which results in longer contexts that lead to more resource consumption. Recent works indicate that LLMs have modeled rich knowledge, albeit not effectively triggered or activated. Inspired by this, we propose a novel knowledge-augmented framework, Imagination-Augmented-Generation (IAG), which simulates the human capacity to compensate for knowledge deficits while answering questions solely through imagination, without relying on external resources. Guided by IAG, we propose an imagine richer context method for question answering (IMcQA), which obtains richer context through the following two modules: explicit imagination by generating a short dummy document with long context compress and implicit imagination with HyperNetwork for generating adapter weights. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that IMcQA exhibits significant advantages in both open-domain and closed-book settings, as well as in both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalizations. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/IAG.
In the upcoming 6G era, vehicular networks are shifting from simple Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication to the more complex Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) connectivity. At the forefront of this shift is the incorporation of Large Language Models (LLMs) into vehicles. Known for their sophisticated natural language processing abilities, LLMs change how users interact with their vehicles. This integration facilitates voice-driven commands and interactions, departing from the conventional manual control systems. However, integrating LLMs into vehicular systems presents notable challenges. The substantial computational demands and energy requirements of LLMs pose significant challenges, especially in the constrained environment of a vehicle. Additionally, the time-sensitive nature of tasks in vehicular networks adds another layer of complexity. In this paper, we consider an edge computing system where vehicles process the initial layers of LLM computations locally, and offload the remaining LLM computation tasks to the Roadside Units (RSUs), envisioning a vehicular ecosystem where LLM computations seamlessly interact with the ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth capabilities of 6G networks. To balance the trade-off between completion time and energy consumption, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize the total cost of the vehicles and RSUs. The problem is then decomposed into two sub-problems, which are solved by sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method and fractional programming technique. The simulation results clearly indicate that the algorithm we have proposed is highly effective in reducing both the completion time and energy consumption of the system.