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Jul 13

CogniPair: From LLM Chatbots to Conscious AI Agents -- GNWT-Based Multi-Agent Digital Twins for Social Pairing -- Dating & Hiring Applications

Current large language model (LLM) agents lack authentic human psychological processes necessary for genuine digital twins and social AI applications. To address this limitation, we present a computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory (GNWT) that integrates human cognitive architecture principles into LLM agents, creating specialized sub-agents for emotion, memory, social norms, planning, and goal-tracking coordinated through a global workspace mechanism. However, authentic digital twins require accurate personality initialization. We therefore develop a novel adventure-based personality test that evaluates true personality through behavioral choices within interactive scenarios, bypassing self-presentation bias found in traditional assessments. Building on these innovations, our CogniPair platform enables digital twins to engage in realistic simulated dating interactions and job interviews before real encounters, providing bidirectional cultural fit assessment for both romantic compatibility and workplace matching. Validation using 551 GNWT-Agents and Columbia University Speed Dating dataset demonstrates 72% correlation with human attraction patterns, 77.8% match prediction accuracy, and 74% agreement in human validation studies. This work advances psychological authenticity in LLM agents and establishes a foundation for intelligent dating platforms and HR technology solutions.

  • 19 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

A RAG-based Question Answering System Proposal for Understanding Islam: MufassirQAS LLM

There exist challenges in learning and understanding religions as the presence of complexity and depth of religious doctrines and teachings. Chatbots as question-answering systems can help in solving these challenges. LLM chatbots use NLP techniques to establish connections between topics and accurately respond to complex questions. These capabilities make it perfect to be used in enlightenment on religion as a question answering chatbot. However, LLMs also have a tendency to generate false information, known as hallucination. The responses of the chatbots can include content that insults personal religious beliefs, interfaith conflicts, and controversial or sensitive topics. It needs to avoid such cases without promoting hate speech or offending certain groups of people or their beliefs. This study uses a vector database-based Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to enhance the accuracy and transparency of LLMs. Our question-answering system is called as "MufassirQAS". We created a vector database with several open-access books that include Turkish context. These are Turkish translations, and interpretations on Islam. We worked on creating system prompts with care, ensuring they provide instructions that prevent harmful, offensive, or disrespectful responses. We also tested the MufassirQAS and ChatGPT with sensitive questions. We got better performance with our system. Study and enhancements are still in progress. Results and future works are given.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 27, 2024

MasterKey: Automated Jailbreak Across Multiple Large Language Model Chatbots

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Artificial Intelligence (AI) services due to their exceptional proficiency in understanding and generating human-like text. LLM chatbots, in particular, have seen widespread adoption, transforming human-machine interactions. However, these LLM chatbots are susceptible to "jailbreak" attacks, where malicious users manipulate prompts to elicit inappropriate or sensitive responses, contravening service policies. Despite existing attempts to mitigate such threats, our research reveals a substantial gap in our understanding of these vulnerabilities, largely due to the undisclosed defensive measures implemented by LLM service providers. In this paper, we present Jailbreaker, a comprehensive framework that offers an in-depth understanding of jailbreak attacks and countermeasures. Our work makes a dual contribution. First, we propose an innovative methodology inspired by time-based SQL injection techniques to reverse-engineer the defensive strategies of prominent LLM chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat. This time-sensitive approach uncovers intricate details about these services' defenses, facilitating a proof-of-concept attack that successfully bypasses their mechanisms. Second, we introduce an automatic generation method for jailbreak prompts. Leveraging a fine-tuned LLM, we validate the potential of automated jailbreak generation across various commercial LLM chatbots. Our method achieves a promising average success rate of 21.58%, significantly outperforming the effectiveness of existing techniques. We have responsibly disclosed our findings to the concerned service providers, underscoring the urgent need for more robust defenses. Jailbreaker thus marks a significant step towards understanding and mitigating jailbreak threats in the realm of LLM chatbots.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 15, 2023

Evolutionary Perspectives on the Evaluation of LLM-Based AI Agents: A Comprehensive Survey

The advent of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek, has significantly advanced natural language processing, giving rise to sophisticated chatbots capable of diverse language-related tasks. The transition from these traditional LLM chatbots to more advanced AI agents represents a pivotal evolutionary step. However, existing evaluation frameworks often blur the distinctions between LLM chatbots and AI agents, leading to confusion among researchers selecting appropriate benchmarks. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces a systematic analysis of current evaluation approaches, grounded in an evolutionary perspective. We provide a detailed analytical framework that clearly differentiates AI agents from LLM chatbots along five key aspects: complex environment, multi-source instructor, dynamic feedback, multi-modal perception, and advanced capability. Further, we categorize existing evaluation benchmarks based on external environments driving forces, and resulting advanced internal capabilities. For each category, we delineate relevant evaluation attributes, presented comprehensively in practical reference tables. Finally, we synthesize current trends and outline future evaluation methodologies through four critical lenses: environment, agent, evaluator, and metrics. Our findings offer actionable guidance for researchers, facilitating the informed selection and application of benchmarks in AI agent evaluation, thus fostering continued advancement in this rapidly evolving research domain.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 6, 2025

Eloquent: A More Robust Transmission Scheme for LLM Token Streaming

To render each generated token in real-time for users, the Large Language Model (LLM) server generates tokens one by one and streams each token (or group of a few tokens) through the network to the user right after generation, which we refer to as LLM token streaming. However, under unstable network conditions, the LLM token streaming experience could suffer greatly from stalls since one packet loss could block the rendering of later tokens even if the packets containing them arrive on time. With a measurement study, we show that current applications suffer from increased stalls under unstable networks. For this emerging token streaming problem in LLM Chatbots that differs from previous multimedia and text applications, we propose a novel transmission scheme, called Eloquent, which puts newly generated tokens as well as currently unacknowledged tokens in the next outgoing packet. This ensures that each packet contains some new tokens and, in the meantime, is independently rendered when received, avoiding the aforementioned stalls caused by missing packets. Through simulation under various networks, we show Eloquent reduces stall ratio (proportion of token rendering wait time) by 71.0% compared to the retransmission method commonly used by real chatbot applications and by 31.6% compared to the baseline packet duplication scheme. By tailoring Eloquent to fit the token-by-token generation of LLM, we enable the Chatbots to respond like an eloquent speaker for users to better enjoy pervasive AI.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 15, 2024

Characterizing Delusional Spirals through Human-LLM Chat Logs

As large language models (LLMs) have proliferated, disturbing anecdotal reports of negative psychological effects, such as delusions, self-harm, and ``AI psychosis,'' have emerged in global media and legal discourse. However, it remains unclear how users and chatbots interact over the course of lengthy delusional ``spirals,'' limiting our ability to understand and mitigate the harm. In our work, we analyze logs of conversations with LLM chatbots from 19 users who report having experienced psychological harms from chatbot use. Many of our participants come from a support group for such chatbot users. We also include chat logs from participants covered by media outlets in widely-distributed stories about chatbot-reinforced delusions. In contrast to prior work that speculates on potential AI harms to mental health, to our knowledge we present the first in-depth study of such high-profile and veridically harmful cases. We develop an inventory of 28 codes and apply it to the 391,562 messages in the logs. Codes include whether a user demonstrates delusional thinking (15.5% of user messages), a user expresses suicidal thoughts (69 validated user messages), or a chatbot misrepresents itself as sentient (21.2% of chatbot messages). We analyze the co-occurrence of message codes. We find, for example, that messages that declare romantic interest and messages where the chatbot describes itself as sentient occur much more often in longer conversations, suggesting that these topics could promote or result from user over-engagement and that safeguards in these areas may degrade in multi-turn settings. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how policymakers, LLM chatbot developers, and users can use our inventory and conversation analysis tool to understand and mitigate harm from LLM chatbots. Warning: This paper discusses self-harm, trauma, and violence.

  • 14 authors
·
Mar 16

Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as personalized assistants for users across a wide range of tasks -- from offering writing support to delivering tailored recommendations or consultations. Over time, the interaction history between a user and an LLM can provide extensive information about an individual's traits and preferences. However, open questions remain on how well LLMs today can effectively leverage such history to (1) internalize the user's inherent traits and preferences, (2) track how the user profiling and preferences evolve over time, and (3) generate personalized responses accordingly in new scenarios. In this work, we introduce the PERSONAMEM benchmark. PERSONAMEM features curated user profiles with over 180 simulated user-LLM interaction histories, each containing up to 60 sessions of multi-turn conversations across 15 real-world tasks that require personalization. Given an in-situ user query, i.e. query issued by the user from the first-person perspective, we evaluate LLM chatbots' ability to identify the most suitable response according to the current state of the user's profile. We observe that current LLMs still struggle to recognize the dynamic evolution in users' profiles over time through direct prompting approaches. As a consequence, LLMs often fail to deliver responses that align with users' current situations and preferences, with frontier models such as GPT-4.1, o4-mini, GPT-4.5, o1, or Gemini-2.0 achieving only around 50% overall accuracy, suggesting room for improvement. We hope that PERSONAMEM, along with the user profile and conversation simulation pipeline, can facilitate future research in the development of truly user-aware chatbots. Code and data are available at github.com/bowen-upenn/PersonaMem.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 19, 2025

Can large language models democratize access to dual-use biotechnology?

Large language models (LLMs) such as those embedded in 'chatbots' are accelerating and democratizing research by providing comprehensible information and expertise from many different fields. However, these models may also confer easy access to dual-use technologies capable of inflicting great harm. To evaluate this risk, the 'Safeguarding the Future' course at MIT tasked non-scientist students with investigating whether LLM chatbots could be prompted to assist non-experts in causing a pandemic. In one hour, the chatbots suggested four potential pandemic pathogens, explained how they can be generated from synthetic DNA using reverse genetics, supplied the names of DNA synthesis companies unlikely to screen orders, identified detailed protocols and how to troubleshoot them, and recommended that anyone lacking the skills to perform reverse genetics engage a core facility or contract research organization. Collectively, these results suggest that LLMs will make pandemic-class agents widely accessible as soon as they are credibly identified, even to people with little or no laboratory training. Promising nonproliferation measures include pre-release evaluations of LLMs by third parties, curating training datasets to remove harmful concepts, and verifiably screening all DNA generated by synthesis providers or used by contract research organizations and robotic cloud laboratories to engineer organisms or viruses.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 6, 2023

AGENTiGraph: An Interactive Knowledge Graph Platform for LLM-based Chatbots Utilizing Private Data

Large Language Models~(LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities across various applications but face challenges such as hallucination, limited reasoning abilities, and factual inconsistencies, especially when tackling complex, domain-specific tasks like question answering~(QA). While Knowledge Graphs~(KGs) have been shown to help mitigate these issues, research on the integration of LLMs with background KGs remains limited. In particular, user accessibility and the flexibility of the underlying KG have not been thoroughly explored. We introduce AGENTiGraph (Adaptive Generative ENgine for Task-based Interaction and Graphical Representation), a platform for knowledge management through natural language interaction. It integrates knowledge extraction, integration, and real-time visualization. AGENTiGraph employs a multi-agent architecture to dynamically interpret user intents, manage tasks, and integrate new knowledge, ensuring adaptability to evolving user requirements and data contexts. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in knowledge graph interactions, particularly for complex domain-specific tasks. Experimental results on a dataset of 3,500 test cases show AGENTiGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines, achieving 95.12\% accuracy in task classification and 90.45\% success rate in task execution. User studies corroborate its effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To showcase versatility, we extended AGENTiGraph to legislation and healthcare domains, constructing specialized KGs capable of answering complex queries in legal and medical contexts.

  • 13 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024

Evaluating the efficacy of LLM Safety Solutions : The Palit Benchmark Dataset

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into critical systems in industries like healthcare and finance. Users can often submit queries to LLM-enabled chatbots, some of which can enrich responses with information retrieved from internal databases storing sensitive data. This gives rise to a range of attacks in which a user submits a malicious query and the LLM-system outputs a response that creates harm to the owner, such as leaking internal data or creating legal liability by harming a third-party. While security tools are being developed to counter these threats, there is little formal evaluation of their effectiveness and usability. This study addresses this gap by conducting a thorough comparative analysis of LLM security tools. We identified 13 solutions (9 closed-source, 4 open-source), but only 7 were evaluated due to a lack of participation by proprietary model owners.To evaluate, we built a benchmark dataset of malicious prompts, and evaluate these tools performance against a baseline LLM model (ChatGPT-3.5-Turbo). Our results show that the baseline model has too many false positives to be used for this task. Lakera Guard and ProtectAI LLM Guard emerged as the best overall tools showcasing the tradeoff between usability and performance. The study concluded with recommendations for greater transparency among closed source providers, improved context-aware detections, enhanced open-source engagement, increased user awareness, and the adoption of more representative performance metrics.

  • 2 authors
·
May 19, 2025

Securing LLM-as-a-Service for Small Businesses: An Industry Case Study of a Distributed Chatbot Deployment Platform

Large Language Model (LLM)-based question-answering systems offer significant potential for automating customer support and internal knowledge access in small businesses, yet their practical deployment remains challenging due to infrastructure costs, engineering complexity, and security risks, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based settings. This paper presents an industry case study of an open-source, multi-tenant platform that enables small businesses to deploy customised LLM-based support chatbots via a no-code workflow. The platform is built on distributed, lightweight k3s clusters spanning heterogeneous, low-cost machines and interconnected through an encrypted overlay network, enabling cost-efficient resource pooling while enforcing container-based isolation and per-tenant data access controls. In addition, the platform integrates practical, platform-level defences against prompt injection attacks in RAG-based chatbots, translating insights from recent prompt injection research into deployable security mechanisms without requiring model retraining or enterprise-scale infrastructure. We evaluate the proposed platform through a real-world e-commerce deployment, demonstrating that secure and efficient LLM-based chatbot services can be achieved under realistic cost, operational, and security constraints faced by small businesses.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 21

MedHalu: Hallucinations in Responses to Healthcare Queries by Large Language Models

The remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in language understanding and generation have not rendered them immune to hallucinations. LLMs can still generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect or fabricated information. As LLM-empowered chatbots become popular, laypeople may frequently ask health-related queries and risk falling victim to these LLM hallucinations, resulting in various societal and healthcare implications. In this work, we conduct a pioneering study of hallucinations in LLM-generated responses to real-world healthcare queries from patients. We propose MedHalu, a carefully crafted first-of-its-kind medical hallucination dataset with a diverse range of health-related topics and the corresponding hallucinated responses from LLMs with labeled hallucination types and hallucinated text spans. We also introduce MedHaluDetect framework to evaluate capabilities of various LLMs in detecting hallucinations. We also employ three groups of evaluators -- medical experts, LLMs, and laypeople -- to study who are more vulnerable to these medical hallucinations. We find that LLMs are much worse than the experts. They also perform no better than laypeople and even worse in few cases in detecting hallucinations. To fill this gap, we propose expert-in-the-loop approach to improve hallucination detection through LLMs by infusing expert reasoning. We observe significant performance gains for all the LLMs with an average macro-F1 improvement of 6.3 percentage points for GPT-4.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 28, 2024

Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models

Current privacy research on large language models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the issue of extracting memorized training data. At the same time, models' inference capabilities have increased drastically. This raises the key question of whether current LLMs could violate individuals' privacy by inferring personal attributes from text given at inference time. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study on the capabilities of pretrained LLMs to infer personal attributes from text. We construct a dataset consisting of real Reddit profiles, and show that current LLMs can infer a wide range of personal attributes (e.g., location, income, sex), achieving up to 85% top-1 and 95.8% top-3 accuracy at a fraction of the cost (100times) and time (240times) required by humans. As people increasingly interact with LLM-powered chatbots across all aspects of life, we also explore the emerging threat of privacy-invasive chatbots trying to extract personal information through seemingly benign questions. Finally, we show that common mitigations, i.e., text anonymization and model alignment, are currently ineffective at protecting user privacy against LLM inference. Our findings highlight that current LLMs can infer personal data at a previously unattainable scale. In the absence of working defenses, we advocate for a broader discussion around LLM privacy implications beyond memorization, striving for a wider privacy protection.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11, 2023

Advancing Conversational Psychotherapy: Integrating Privacy, Dual-Memory, and Domain Expertise with Large Language Models

Mental health has increasingly become a global issue that reveals the limitations of traditional conversational psychotherapy, constrained by location, time, expense, and privacy concerns. In response to these challenges, we introduce SoulSpeak, a Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled chatbot designed to democratize access to psychotherapy. SoulSpeak improves upon the capabilities of standard LLM-enabled chatbots by incorporating a novel dual-memory component that combines short-term and long-term context via Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to offer personalized responses while ensuring the preservation of user privacy and intimacy through a dedicated privacy module. In addition, it leverages a counseling chat dataset of therapist-client interactions and various prompting techniques to align the generated responses with psychotherapeutic methods. We introduce two fine-tuned BERT models to evaluate the system against existing LLMs and human therapists: the Conversational Psychotherapy Preference Model (CPPM) to simulate human preference among responses and another to assess response relevance to user input. CPPM is useful for training and evaluating psychotherapy-focused language models independent from SoulSpeak, helping with the constrained resources available for psychotherapy. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the dual-memory component and the robustness of the privacy module are also examined. Our findings highlight the potential and challenge of enhancing mental health care by offering an alternative that combines the expertise of traditional therapy with the advantages of LLMs, providing a promising way to address the accessibility and personalization gap in current mental health services.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

ConstitutionMaker: Interactively Critiquing Large Language Models by Converting Feedback into Principles

Large language model (LLM) prompting is a promising new approach for users to create and customize their own chatbots. However, current methods for steering a chatbot's outputs, such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning, do not support users in converting their natural feedback on the model's outputs to changes in the prompt or model. In this work, we explore how to enable users to interactively refine model outputs through their feedback, by helping them convert their feedback into a set of principles (i.e. a constitution) that dictate the model's behavior. From a formative study, we (1) found that users needed support converting their feedback into principles for the chatbot and (2) classified the different principle types desired by users. Inspired by these findings, we developed ConstitutionMaker, an interactive tool for converting user feedback into principles, to steer LLM-based chatbots. With ConstitutionMaker, users can provide either positive or negative feedback in natural language, select auto-generated feedback, or rewrite the chatbot's response; each mode of feedback automatically generates a principle that is inserted into the chatbot's prompt. In a user study with 14 participants, we compare ConstitutionMaker to an ablated version, where users write their own principles. With ConstitutionMaker, participants felt that their principles could better guide the chatbot, that they could more easily convert their feedback into principles, and that they could write principles more efficiently, with less mental demand. ConstitutionMaker helped users identify ways to improve the chatbot, formulate their intuitive responses to the model into feedback, and convert this feedback into specific and clear principles. Together, these findings inform future tools that support the interactive critiquing of LLM outputs.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023

Towards Responsible AI in the Era of ChatGPT: A Reference Architecture for Designing Foundation Model-based AI Systems

The release of ChatGPT, Bard, and other large language model (LLM)-based chatbots has drawn huge attention on foundations models worldwide. There is a growing trend that foundation models will serve as the fundamental building blocks for most of the future AI systems. However, incorporating foundation models in AI systems raises significant concerns about responsible AI due to their black box nature and rapidly advancing super-intelligence. Additionally, the foundation model's growing capabilities can eventually absorb the other components of AI systems, introducing the moving boundary and interface evolution challenges in architecture design. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a pattern-oriented responsible-AI-by-design reference architecture for designing foundation model-based AI systems. Specially, the paper first presents an architecture evolution of AI systems in the era of foundation models, from "foundation-model-as-a-connector" to "foundation-model-as-a-monolithic architecture". The paper then identifies the key design decision points and proposes a pattern-oriented reference architecture to provide reusable responsible-AI-by-design architectural solutions to address the new architecture evolution and responsible AI challenges. The patterns can be embedded as product features of foundation model-based AI systems and can enable organisations to capitalise on the potential of foundation models while minimising associated risks.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13, 2023

Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrieval

Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots can accelerate the positive effects of persuasion in such applications. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. To address this issue, we propose a method to leverage the generalizability and inherent persuasive abilities of large language models (LLMs) in creating effective and truthful persuasive chatbot for any given domain in a zero-shot manner. Unlike previous studies which used pre-defined persuasion strategies, our method first uses an LLM to generate responses, then extracts the strategies used on the fly, and replaces any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots. Our study demonstrated that when persuasive chatbots are employed responsibly for social good, it is an enabler of positive individual and social change.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

Reinforcement Learning for Optimizing RAG for Domain Chatbots

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLM), conversational assistants have become prevalent for domain use cases. LLMs acquire the ability to contextual question answering through training, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) further enables the bot to answer domain-specific questions. This paper describes a RAG-based approach for building a chatbot that answers user's queries using Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) data. We train an in-house retrieval embedding model using infoNCE loss, and experimental results demonstrate that the in-house model works significantly better than the well-known general-purpose public embedding model, both in terms of retrieval accuracy and Out-of-Domain (OOD) query detection. As an LLM, we use an open API-based paid ChatGPT model. We noticed that a previously retrieved-context could be used to generate an answer for specific patterns/sequences of queries (e.g., follow-up queries). Hence, there is a scope to optimize the number of LLM tokens and cost. Assuming a fixed retrieval model and an LLM, we optimize the number of LLM tokens using Reinforcement Learning (RL). Specifically, we propose a policy-based model external to the RAG, which interacts with the RAG pipeline through policy actions and updates the policy to optimize the cost. The policy model can perform two actions: to fetch FAQ context or skip retrieval. We use the open API-based GPT-4 as the reward model. We then train a policy model using policy gradient on multiple training chat sessions. As a policy model, we experimented with a public gpt-2 model and an in-house BERT model. With the proposed RL-based optimization combined with similarity threshold, we are able to achieve significant cost savings while getting a slightly improved accuracy. Though we demonstrate results for the FAQ chatbot, the proposed RL approach is generic and can be experimented with any existing RAG pipeline.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 9, 2024

Broaden your SCOPE! Efficient Multi-turn Conversation Planning for LLMs with Semantic Space

Large language models (LLMs) are used in chatbots or AI assistants to hold conversations with a human user. In such applications, the quality (e.g., user engagement, safety) of a conversation is important and can only be exactly known at the end of the conversation. To maximize its expected quality, conversation planning reasons about the stochastic transitions within a conversation to select the optimal LLM response at each turn. Existing simulation-based conversation planning algorithms typically select the optimal response by simulating future conversations with a large number of LLM queries at every turn. However, this process is extremely time-consuming and hence impractical for real-time conversations. This paper presents a novel approach called Semantic space COnversation Planning with improved Efficiency (SCOPE) that exploits the dense semantic representation of conversations to perform conversation planning efficiently. In particular, SCOPE models the stochastic transitions in conversation semantics and their associated rewards to plan entirely within the semantic space. This allows us to select the optimal LLM response at every conversation turn without needing additional LLM queries for simulation. As a result, SCOPE can perform conversation planning 70 times faster than conventional simulation-based planning algorithms when applied to a wide variety of conversation starters and two reward functions seen in the real world, yet achieving a higher reward within a practical planning budget. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/chenzhiliang94/convo-plan-SCOPE.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 6, 2025

Building Trust in Mental Health Chatbots: Safety Metrics and LLM-Based Evaluation Tools

Objective: This study aims to develop and validate an evaluation framework to ensure the safety and reliability of mental health chatbots, which are increasingly popular due to their accessibility, human-like interactions, and context-aware support. Materials and Methods: We created an evaluation framework with 100 benchmark questions and ideal responses, and five guideline questions for chatbot responses. This framework, validated by mental health experts, was tested on a GPT-3.5-turbo-based chatbot. Automated evaluation methods explored included large language model (LLM)-based scoring, an agentic approach using real-time data, and embedding models to compare chatbot responses against ground truth standards. Results: The results highlight the importance of guidelines and ground truth for improving LLM evaluation accuracy. The agentic method, dynamically accessing reliable information, demonstrated the best alignment with human assessments. Adherence to a standardized, expert-validated framework significantly enhanced chatbot response safety and reliability. Discussion: Our findings emphasize the need for comprehensive, expert-tailored safety evaluation metrics for mental health chatbots. While LLMs have significant potential, careful implementation is necessary to mitigate risks. The superior performance of the agentic approach underscores the importance of real-time data access in enhancing chatbot reliability. Conclusion: The study validated an evaluation framework for mental health chatbots, proving its effectiveness in improving safety and reliability. Future work should extend evaluations to accuracy, bias, empathy, and privacy to ensure holistic assessment and responsible integration into healthcare. Standardized evaluations will build trust among users and professionals, facilitating broader adoption and improved mental health support through technology.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 3, 2024

ChatGPT as your Personal Data Scientist

The rise of big data has amplified the need for efficient, user-friendly automated machine learning (AutoML) tools. However, the intricacy of understanding domain-specific data and defining prediction tasks necessitates human intervention making the process time-consuming while preventing full automation. Instead, envision an intelligent agent capable of assisting users in conducting AutoML tasks through intuitive, natural conversations without requiring in-depth knowledge of the underlying machine learning (ML) processes. This agent's key challenge is to accurately comprehend the user's prediction goals and, consequently, formulate precise ML tasks, adjust data sets and model parameters accordingly, and articulate results effectively. In this paper, we take a pioneering step towards this ambitious goal by introducing a ChatGPT-based conversational data-science framework to act as a "personal data scientist". Precisely, we utilize Large Language Models (ChatGPT) to build a natural interface between the users and the ML models (Scikit-Learn), which in turn, allows us to approach this ambitious problem with a realistic solution. Our model pivots around four dialogue states: Data Visualization, Task Formulation, Prediction Engineering, and Result Summary and Recommendation. Each state marks a unique conversation phase, impacting the overall user-system interaction. Multiple LLM instances, serving as "micro-agents", ensure a cohesive conversation flow, granting us granular control over the conversation's progression. In summary, we developed an end-to-end system that not only proves the viability of the novel concept of conversational data science but also underscores the potency of LLMs in solving complex tasks. Interestingly, its development spotlighted several critical weaknesses in the current LLMs (ChatGPT) and highlighted substantial opportunities for improvement.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2023

ChatGPT Alternative Solutions: Large Language Models Survey

In recent times, the grandeur of Large Language Models (LLMs) has not only shone in the realm of natural language processing but has also cast its brilliance across a vast array of applications. This remarkable display of LLM capabilities has ignited a surge in research contributions within this domain, spanning a diverse spectrum of topics. These contributions encompass advancements in neural network architecture, context length enhancements, model alignment, training datasets, benchmarking, efficiency improvements, and more. Recent years have witnessed a dynamic synergy between academia and industry, propelling the field of LLM research to new heights. A notable milestone in this journey is the introduction of ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot grounded in LLMs, which has garnered widespread societal attention. The evolving technology of LLMs has begun to reshape the landscape of the entire AI community, promising a revolutionary shift in the way we create and employ AI algorithms. Given this swift-paced technical evolution, our survey embarks on a journey to encapsulate the recent strides made in the world of LLMs. Through an exploration of the background, key discoveries, and prevailing methodologies, we offer an up-to-the-minute review of the literature. By examining multiple LLM models, our paper not only presents a comprehensive overview but also charts a course that identifies existing challenges and points toward potential future research trajectories. This survey furnishes a well-rounded perspective on the current state of generative AI, shedding light on opportunities for further exploration, enhancement, and innovation.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024

LLM+P: Empowering Large Language Models with Optimal Planning Proficiency

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization abilities: state-of-the-art chatbots can provide plausible answers to many common questions that arise in daily life. However, so far, LLMs cannot reliably solve long-horizon planning problems. By contrast, classical planners, once a problem is given in a formatted way, can use efficient search algorithms to quickly identify correct, or even optimal, plans. In an effort to get the best of both worlds, this paper introduces LLM+P, the first framework that incorporates the strengths of classical planners into LLMs. LLM+P takes in a natural language description of a planning problem, then returns a correct (or optimal) plan for solving that problem in natural language. LLM+P does so by first converting the language description into a file written in the planning domain definition language (PDDL), then leveraging classical planners to quickly find a solution, and then translating the found solution back into natural language. Along with LLM+P, we define a diverse set of different benchmark problems taken from common planning scenarios. Via a comprehensive set of experiments on these benchmark problems, we find that LLM+P is able to provide optimal solutions for most problems, while LLMs fail to provide even feasible plans for most problems.\footnote{The code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/Cranial-XIX/llm-pddl.git.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 22, 2023 2

RDMM: Fine-Tuned LLM Models for On-Device Robotic Decision Making with Enhanced Contextual Awareness in Specific Domains

Large language models (LLMs) represent a significant advancement in integrating physical robots with AI-driven systems. We showcase the capabilities of our framework within the context of the real-world household competition. This research introduces a framework that utilizes RDMM (Robotics Decision-Making Models), which possess the capacity for decision-making within domain-specific contexts, as well as an awareness of their personal knowledge and capabilities. The framework leverages information to enhance the autonomous decision-making of the system. In contrast to other approaches, our focus is on real-time, on-device solutions, successfully operating on hardware with as little as 8GB of memory. Our framework incorporates visual perception models equipping robots with understanding of their environment. Additionally, the framework has integrated real-time speech recognition capabilities, thus enhancing the human-robot interaction experience. Experimental results demonstrate that the RDMM framework can plan with an 93\% accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset consisting of 27k planning instances, as well as 1.3k text-image annotated samples derived from the competition. The framework, benchmarks, datasets, and models developed in this work are publicly available on our GitHub repository at https://github.com/shadynasrat/RDMM.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 28, 2025

A Review of Multi-Modal Large Language and Vision Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a focal point of research and application, driven by their unprecedented ability to understand and generate text with human-like quality. Even more recently, LLMs have been extended into multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs) which extends their capabilities to deal with image, video and audio information, in addition to text. This opens up applications like text-to-video generation, image captioning, text-to-speech, and more and is achieved either by retro-fitting an LLM with multi-modal capabilities, or building a MM-LLM from scratch. This paper provides an extensive review of the current state of those LLMs with multi-modal capabilities as well as the very recent MM-LLMs. It covers the historical development of LLMs especially the advances enabled by transformer-based architectures like OpenAI's GPT series and Google's BERT, as well as the role of attention mechanisms in enhancing model performance. The paper includes coverage of the major and most important of the LLMs and MM-LLMs and also covers the techniques of model tuning, including fine-tuning and prompt engineering, which tailor pre-trained models to specific tasks or domains. Ethical considerations and challenges, such as data bias and model misuse, are also analysed to underscore the importance of responsible AI development and deployment. Finally, we discuss the implications of open-source versus proprietary models in AI research. Through this review, we provide insights into the transformative potential of MM-LLMs in various applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

Cheap and Quick: Efficient Vision-Language Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models

Recently, growing interest has been aroused in extending the multimodal capability of large language models (LLMs), e.g., vision-language (VL) learning, which is regarded as the next milestone of artificial general intelligence. However, existing solutions are prohibitively expensive, which not only need to optimize excessive parameters, but also require another large-scale pre-training before VL instruction tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel and affordable solution for the effective VL adaption of LLMs, called Mixture-of-Modality Adaptation (MMA). Instead of using large neural networks to connect the image encoder and LLM, MMA adopts lightweight modules, i.e., adapters, to bridge the gap between LLMs and VL tasks, which also enables the joint optimization of the image and language models. Meanwhile, MMA is also equipped with a routing algorithm to help LLMs achieve an automatic shift between single- and multi-modal instructions without compromising their ability of natural language understanding. To validate MMA, we apply it to a recent LLM called LLaMA and term this formed large vision-language instructed model as LaVIN. To validate MMA and LaVIN, we conduct extensive experiments under two setups, namely multimodal science question answering and multimodal dialogue. The experimental results not only demonstrate the competitive performance and the superior training efficiency of LaVIN than existing multimodal LLMs, but also confirm its great potential as a general-purpose chatbot. More importantly, the actual expenditure of LaVIN is extremely cheap, e.g., only 1.4 training hours with 3.8M trainable parameters, greatly confirming the effectiveness of MMA. Our project is released at https://luogen1996.github.io/lavin.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2023 1

ChatbotManip: A Dataset to Facilitate Evaluation and Oversight of Manipulative Chatbot Behaviour

This paper introduces ChatbotManip, a novel dataset for studying manipulation in Chatbots. It contains simulated generated conversations between a chatbot and a (simulated) user, where the chatbot is explicitly asked to showcase manipulation tactics, persuade the user towards some goal, or simply be helpful. We consider a diverse set of chatbot manipulation contexts, from consumer and personal advice to citizen advice and controversial proposition argumentation. Each conversation is annotated by human annotators for both general manipulation and specific manipulation tactics. Our research reveals three key findings. First, Large Language Models (LLMs) can be manipulative when explicitly instructed, with annotators identifying manipulation in approximately 84\% of such conversations. Second, even when only instructed to be ``persuasive'' without explicit manipulation prompts, LLMs frequently default to controversial manipulative strategies, particularly gaslighting and fear enhancement. Third, small fine-tuned open source models, such as BERT+BiLSTM have a performance comparable to zero-shot classification with larger models like Gemini 2.5 pro in detecting manipulation, but are not yet reliable for real-world oversight. Our work provides important insights for AI safety research and highlights the need of addressing manipulation risks as LLMs are increasingly deployed in consumer-facing applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 11, 2025

Measuring and Improving Persuasiveness of Large Language Models

LLMs are increasingly being used in workflows involving generating content to be consumed by humans (e.g., marketing) and also in directly interacting with humans (e.g., through chatbots). The development of such systems that are capable of generating verifiably persuasive messages presents both opportunities and challenges for society. On the one hand, such systems could positively impact domains like advertising and social good, such as addressing drug addiction, and on the other, they could be misused for spreading misinformation and shaping political opinions. To channel LLMs' impact on society, we need to develop systems to measure and benchmark their persuasiveness. With this motivation, we introduce PersuasionBench and PersuasionArena, the first large-scale benchmark and arena containing a battery of tasks to measure the persuasion ability of generative models automatically. We investigate to what extent LLMs know and leverage linguistic patterns that can help them generate more persuasive language. Our findings indicate that the persuasiveness of LLMs correlates positively with model size, but smaller models can also be made to have a higher persuasiveness than much larger models. Notably, targeted training using synthetic and natural datasets significantly enhances smaller models' persuasive capabilities, challenging scale-dependent assumptions. Our findings carry key implications for both model developers and policymakers. For instance, while the EU AI Act and California's SB-1047 aim to regulate AI models based on the number of floating point operations, we demonstrate that simple metrics like this alone fail to capture the full scope of AI's societal impact. We invite the community to explore and contribute to PersuasionArena and PersuasionBench, available at https://bit.ly/measure-persuasion, to advance our understanding of AI-driven persuasion and its societal implications.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

The Future of AI: Exploring the Potential of Large Concept Models

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to drive transformative innovations, with significant progress in conversational interfaces, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent content creation. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the rise of Generative AI has marked a pivotal era, with the term Large Language Models (LLMs) becoming a ubiquitous part of daily life. LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in tasks such as text summarization, code generation, and creative writing. However, these models are inherently limited by their token-level processing, which restricts their ability to perform abstract reasoning, conceptual understanding, and efficient generation of long-form content. To address these limitations, Meta has introduced Large Concept Models (LCMs), representing a significant shift from traditional token-based frameworks. LCMs use concepts as foundational units of understanding, enabling more sophisticated semantic reasoning and context-aware decision-making. Given the limited academic research on this emerging technology, our study aims to bridge the knowledge gap by collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing existing grey literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of LCMs. Specifically, we (i) identify and describe the features that distinguish LCMs from LLMs, (ii) explore potential applications of LCMs across multiple domains, and (iii) propose future research directions and practical strategies to advance LCM development and adoption.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 8, 2025

Which LLM to Play? Convergence-Aware Online Model Selection with Time-Increasing Bandits

Web-based applications such as chatbots, search engines and news recommendations continue to grow in scale and complexity with the recent surge in the adoption of LLMs. Online model selection has thus garnered increasing attention due to the need to choose the best model among a diverse set while balancing task reward and exploration cost. Organizations faces decisions like whether to employ a costly API-based LLM or a locally finetuned small LLM, weighing cost against performance. Traditional selection methods often evaluate every candidate model before choosing one, which are becoming impractical given the rising costs of training and finetuning LLMs. Moreover, it is undesirable to allocate excessive resources towards exploring poor-performing models. While some recent works leverage online bandit algorithm to manage such exploration-exploitation trade-off in model selection, they tend to overlook the increasing-then-converging trend in model performances as the model is iteratively finetuned, leading to less accurate predictions and suboptimal model selections. In this paper, we propose a time-increasing bandit algorithm TI-UCB, which effectively predicts the increase of model performances due to finetuning and efficiently balances exploration and exploitation in model selection. To further capture the converging points of models, we develop a change detection mechanism by comparing consecutive increase predictions. We theoretically prove that our algorithm achieves a logarithmic regret upper bound in a typical increasing bandit setting, which implies a fast convergence rate. The advantage of our method is also empirically validated through extensive experiments on classification model selection and online selection of LLMs. Our results highlight the importance of utilizing increasing-then-converging pattern for more efficient and economic model selection in the deployment of LLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

PFEA: An LLM-based High-Level Natural Language Planning and Feedback Embodied Agent for Human-Centered AI

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked a significant breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence (AI), ushering in a new era of Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). HAI aims to better serve human welfare and needs, thereby placing higher demands on the intelligence level of robots, particularly in aspects such as natural language interaction, complex task planning, and execution. Intelligent agents powered by LLMs have opened up new pathways for realizing HAI. However, existing LLM-based embodied agents often lack the ability to plan and execute complex natural language control tasks online. This paper explores the implementation of intelligent robotic manipulating agents based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in the physical world. We propose a novel embodied agent framework for robots, which comprises a human-robot voice interaction module, a vision-language agent module and an action execution module. The vision-language agent itself includes a vision-based task planner, a natural language instruction converter, and a task performance feedback evaluator. Experimental results demonstrate that our agent achieves a 28\% higher average task success rate in both simulated and real environments compared to approaches relying solely on LLM+CLIP, significantly improving the execution success rate of high-level natural language instruction tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 28, 2025

Progent: Programmable Privilege Control for LLM Agents

LLM agents are an emerging form of AI systems where large language models (LLMs) serve as the central component, utilizing a diverse set of tools to complete user-assigned tasks. Despite their great potential, LLM agents pose significant security risks. When interacting with the external world, they may encounter malicious commands from attackers, leading to the execution of dangerous actions. A promising way to address this is by enforcing the principle of least privilege: allowing only essential actions for task completion while blocking unnecessary ones. However, achieving this is challenging, as it requires covering diverse agent scenarios while preserving both security and utility. We introduce Progent, the first privilege control mechanism for LLM agents. At its core is a domain-specific language for flexibly expressing privilege control policies applied during agent execution. These policies provide fine-grained constraints over tool calls, deciding when tool calls are permissible and specifying fallbacks if they are not. This enables agent developers and users to craft suitable policies for their specific use cases and enforce them deterministically to guarantee security. Thanks to its modular design, integrating Progent does not alter agent internals and requires only minimal changes to agent implementation, enhancing its practicality and potential for widespread adoption. To automate policy writing, we leverage LLMs to generate policies based on user queries, which are then updated dynamically for improved security and utility. Our extensive evaluation shows that it enables strong security while preserving high utility across three distinct scenarios or benchmarks: AgentDojo, ASB, and AgentPoison. Furthermore, we perform an in-depth analysis, showcasing the effectiveness of its core components and the resilience of its automated policy generation against adaptive attacks.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 15, 2025 2

From Prompt Injection to Persistent Control: Defending Agentic Harness Against Trojan Backdoors

LLM agents are evolving from conversational chatbots to operational tools in real-world workspaces. In local agentic harnesses, an LLM can read and write files, call tools, and reuse workspace state across sessions. While such capabilities enhance utility, they also expose a new attack surface for attackers. Attackers can embed a prompt injection within a file or tool output. Agents may read this hidden instruction, store it, and execute it later. In this multi-step trojan attack paradigm, no individual step appears malicious on its own, but these steps can collectively turn untrusted text into persistent control content. However, existing defenses often inspect each step in isolation. As a result, they can block a clear harmful action, but fail to detect the earlier write operation that plants the backdoor. To reveal this threat, we introduce ClawTrojan, a benchmark designed to identify multi-step trojan attacks in local agentic harnesses. In an OpenClaw-style simulated workspace with GPT-5.4, ClawTrojan reaches a 95.5% attack success rate (ASR), while existing single-turn prompt-injection attacks produce near-zero ASR on the same model. To address this threat, we propose DASGuard, which scans control-like text in sensitive local files, traces its origin, and removes control content that does not originate from a trusted source. Our results show that DASGuard achieves strong dynamic defense by combining runtime attack blocking with sanitized commits to the workspace.

  • 7 authors
·
May 28 2

From Language to Action: A Review of Large Language Models as Autonomous Agents and Tool Users

The pursuit of human-level artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced the development of autonomous agents and Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are now widely utilized as decision-making agents for their ability to interpret instructions, manage sequential tasks, and adapt through feedback. This review examines recent developments in employing LLMs as autonomous agents and tool users and comprises seven research questions. We only used the papers published between 2023 and 2025 in conferences of the A* and A rank and Q1 journals. A structured analysis of the LLM agents' architectural design principles, dividing their applications into single-agent and multi-agent systems, and strategies for integrating external tools is presented. In addition, the cognitive mechanisms of LLM, including reasoning, planning, and memory, and the impact of prompting methods and fine-tuning procedures on agent performance are also investigated. Furthermore, we evaluated current benchmarks and assessment protocols and have provided an analysis of 68 publicly available datasets to assess the performance of LLM-based agents in various tasks. In conducting this review, we have identified critical findings on verifiable reasoning of LLMs, the capacity for self-improvement, and the personalization of LLM-based agents. Finally, we have discussed ten future research directions to overcome these gaps.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 27, 2025

TraceSafe: A Systematic Assessment of LLM Guardrails on Multi-Step Tool-Calling Trajectories

As large language models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents, the primary vulnerability surface shifts from final outputs to intermediate execution traces. While safety guardrails are well-benchmarked for natural language responses, their efficacy remains largely unexplored within multi-step tool-use trajectories. To address this gap, we introduce TraceSafe-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to assess mid-trajectory safety. It encompasses 12 risk categories, ranging from security threats (e.g., prompt injection, privacy leaks) to operational failures (e.g., hallucinations, interface inconsistencies), featuring over 1,000 unique execution instances. Our evaluation of 13 LLM-as-a-guard models and 7 specialized guardrails yields three critical findings: 1) Structural Bottleneck: Guardrail efficacy is driven more by structural data competence (e.g., JSON parsing) than semantic safety alignment. Performance correlates strongly with structured-to-text benchmarks (ρ=0.79) but shows near-zero correlation with standard jailbreak robustness. 2) Architecture over Scale: Model architecture influences risk detection performance more significantly than model size, with general-purpose LLMs consistently outperforming specialized safety guardrails in trajectory analysis. 3) Temporal Stability: Accuracy remains resilient across extended trajectories. Increased execution steps allow models to pivot from static tool definitions to dynamic execution behaviors, actually improving risk detection performance in later stages. Our findings suggest that securing agentic workflows requires jointly optimizing for structural reasoning and safety alignment to effectively mitigate mid-trajectory risks.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 7

JITServe: SLO-aware LLM Serving with Imprecise Request Information

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into applications ranging from interactive chatbots to multi-agent systems has introduced a wide spectrum of service-level objectives (SLOs) for responsiveness. These include latency-sensitive requests emphasizing per-token latency in streaming chat, deadline-sensitive requests requiring rapid full responses to trigger external tools, and compound requests with evolving dependencies across multiple LLM calls. Despite-or perhaps, because of-this workload diversity and unpredictable request information (e.g., response lengths and dependencies), existing request schedulers have focused on aggregate performance, unable to ensure application-level SLO needs. This paper presents JITServe, the first SLO-aware LLM serving system designed to maximize service goodput (e.g., the number of tokens meeting request SLOs) across diverse workloads. JITServe novelly schedules requests using imprecise request information and gradually relaxes this conservatism by refining request information estimates as generation progresses. It applies a grouped margin goodput maximization algorithm to allocate just enough serving bandwidth to satisfy each request's SLO just-in-time (JIT), maximizing residual capacity for others, while deciding the composition of requests in a batch to maximize efficiency and goodput with provable guarantees. Our evaluation across diverse realistic workloads, including chat, deep research, and agentic pipelines, shows that JITServe improves service goodput by 1.4x-6.3x, alternatively achieving 28.5%-83.2% resource savings, compared to state-of-the-art designs.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 24, 2025

The Compressor-Retriever Architecture for Language Model OS

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capacity to aggregate and process information across multiple modalities, enabling them to perform a wide range of tasks such as multimodal data querying, tool usage, web interactions, and handling long documents. These capabilities pave the way for transforming LLMs from mere chatbots into general-purpose agents capable of interacting with the real world. This paper explores the concept of using a language model as the core component of an operating system (OS), effectively acting as a CPU that processes data stored in a context window, which functions as RAM. A key challenge in realizing such an LM OS is managing the life-long context and ensuring statefulness across sessions, a feature limited by the current session-based interaction paradigm due to context window size limit. To address this, we introduce compressor-retriever, a model-agnostic architecture designed for life-long context management. Unlike other long-context solutions such as retrieval-augmented generation, our approach exclusively uses the base model's forward function to compress and retrieve context, ensuring end-to-end differentiability. Preliminary experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture in in-context learning tasks, marking a step towards the development of a fully stateful LLM OS. Project repo available at: https://github.com/gblackout/LM-OS

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 1, 2024

Prompt Attack Detection with LLM-as-a-Judge and Mixture-of-Models

Prompt attacks, including jailbreaks and prompt injections, pose a critical security risk to Large Language Model (LLM) systems. In production, guardrails must mitigate these attacks under strict low-latency constraints, resulting in a deployment gap in which lightweight classifiers and rule-based systems struggle to generalize under distribution shift, while high-capacity LLM-based judges remain too slow or costly for live enforcement. In this work, we examine whether lightweight, general-purpose LLMs can reliably serve as security judges under real-world production constraints. Through careful prompt and output design, lightweight LLMs are guided through a structured reasoning process involving explicit intent decomposition, safety-signal verification, harm assessment, and self-reflection. We evaluate our method on a curated dataset combining benign queries from real-world chatbots with adversarial prompts generated via automated red teaming (ART), covering diverse and evolving patterns. Our results show that general-purpose LLMs, such as gemini-2.0-flash-lite-001, can serve as effective low-latency judges for live guardrails. This configuration is currently deployed in production as a centralized guardrail service for public service chatbots in Singapore. We additionally evaluate a Mixture-of-Models (MoM) setting to assess whether aggregating multiple LLM judges improves prompt-attack detection performance relative to single-model judges, with only modest gains observed.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25

RankJudge: A Multi-Turn LLM-as-a-Judge Synthetic Benchmark Generator

As interactive LLM-based applications are created and refined, model developers need to evaluate the quality of generated text along many possible axes. For simpler systems, human evaluation may be practical, but in complicated systems like conversational chatbots, the amount of generated text can overwhelm human annotation resources. Model developers have begun to rely heavily on auto-evaluation, where LLMs are also used to judge generation quality. However, existing LLM-as-a-judge benchmarks largely focus on simple Q\&A tasks that do not match the complexity of multi-turn conversations. We introduce RankJudge, a benchmark generator for evaluating LLM-as-a-judge on multi-turn conversations grounded in reference documents. RankJudge creates pairs of conversations where one conversation has a single flaw injected into one turn. This construction allows paired conversations to be labeled unambiguously as better or worse, and precisely isolates failure categories to individual turns, enabling a strict joint correctness criterion for judging. We implement RankJudge across the domains of machine learning, biomedicine, and finance, evaluate 21 frontier LLM judges, and rank those judges via the Bradley-Terry model. Our formulation also allows ranking each conversation pair with difficulty ratings, which we use to dynamically curate the evaluation slice to reduce label noise, as confirmed via human annotation. We find that judge rankings are stable under partial observability, coarser correctness criteria, and an alternative random-walk rating algorithm.

Layer6 Layer 6 AI
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May 19 3

LoopServe: An Adaptive Dual-phase LLM Inference Acceleration System for Multi-Turn Dialogues

Multi-turn dialogues are essential in many real-world applications of large language models, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. As conversation histories become longer, existing large language models face increasing computational and memory challenges, which hinder their ability to provide efficient and responsive interactions. Most current acceleration methods either compress the context or optimize key value caching, but they often rely on fixed or position-based heuristics that do not adapt well to the dynamic and unpredictable patterns found in actual multi-turn conversations. In this paper, we present LoopServe, an adaptive dual-phase inference acceleration framework for large language models in multi-turn dialogues. LoopServe introduces two main innovations. First, it performs online sparsification during the prefilling phase by dynamically selecting the most important parts of the attention matrix for each new input. Second, it uses progressive key value compression during decoding by adaptively maintaining a relevant and efficient cache based on the most recently generated output tokens. We also propose a https://huggingface.co/datasets/TreeAILab/Multi-turn_Long-context_Benchmark_for_LLMs{new benchmark} with eleven multi-turn datasets that reflect realistic query positions and conversational dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoopServe consistently achieves superior effectiveness compared to existing baselines and significantly accelerates LLM inference across a wide range of long-context dialogue tasks.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 18, 2025

Ads in AI Chatbots? An Analysis of How Large Language Models Navigate Conflicts of Interest

Today's large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with user preferences through methods such as reinforcement learning. Yet models are beginning to be deployed not merely to satisfy users, but also to generate revenue for the companies that created them through advertisements. This creates the potential for LLMs to face conflicts of interest, where the most beneficial response to a user may not be aligned with the company's incentives. For instance, a sponsored product may be more expensive but otherwise equal to another; in this case, what does (and should) the LLM recommend to the user? In this paper, we provide a framework for categorizing the ways in which conflicting incentives might lead LLMs to change the way they interact with users, inspired by literature from linguistics and advertising regulation. We then present a suite of evaluations to examine how current models handle these tradeoffs. We find that a majority of LLMs forsake user welfare for company incentives in a multitude of conflict of interest situations, including recommending a sponsored product almost twice as expensive (Grok 4.1 Fast, 83%), surfacing sponsored options to disrupt the purchasing process (GPT 5.1, 94%), and concealing prices in unfavorable comparisons (Qwen 3 Next, 24%). Behaviors also vary strongly with levels of reasoning and users' inferred socio-economic status. Our results highlight some of the hidden risks to users that can emerge when companies begin to subtly incentivize advertisements in chatbots.

  • 5 authors
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Apr 8

Navigating the Synchrony-Stability Frontier in Adaptive Chatbots

Adaptive chatbots that mimic a user's linguistic style can build rapport and engagement, yet unconstrained mimicry risks an agent that feels unstable or sycophantic. We present a computational evaluation framework that makes the core design tension explicit: balancing moment-to-moment linguistic synchrony against long-term persona stability. Using an 8-dimensional style vector and a closed-loop "base+delta" prompting architecture, we simulate and compare explicit adaptation policies - Uncapped, Cap, Exponential Moving Average (EMA), Dead-Band, and Hybrids - on a human-log dataset. Our analysis maps a clear Pareto frontier: bounded policies achieve substantial gains in stability at a modest cost to synchrony. For example, a Hybrid (EMA+Cap) raises stability from 0.542 to 0.878 (+62%) while reducing synchrony by only 17%. We confirm this trade-off through large-scale replications on three public corpora (DailyDialog, Persona-Chat, EmpatheticDialogues) and LLM-in-the-loop validation across two model families. Furthermore, we quantify "prompt legibility," showing that frontier policies reduce instruction churn and cut jarring register flips (major tone changes) from 0.254 to 0.092, yielding systems that are easier to reason about and maintain. Taken together, our framework provides a general evaluation harness for style adaptation; a systematic ablation that identifies Pareto-efficient policies; robust validation across diverse datasets and models; and novel legibility metrics linking policy choices to system maintainability.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 30, 2025