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While large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 have achieved impressive results on multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in the zero, one, and few-shot settings, they generally lag behind the MCQA state of the art (SOTA). MCQA tasks have traditionally been presented to LLMs like cloze tasks. An LLM is conditioned on a question (without the associated answer options) and its chosen option is the one assigned the highest probability after normalization (for length, etc.). A more natural prompting approach is to present the question and answer options to the LLM jointly and have it output the symbol (e.g., “A”) associated with its chosen answer option. This approach allows the model to explicitly compare answer options, reduces computational costs, and mitigates the effects of tokenization scheme and answer option representations on answer selection. For the natural approach to be effective, the LLM it is used with must be able to associate answer options with the symbols that represent them. The LLM needs what we term multiple choice symbol binding (MCSB) ability. This ability varies greatly by model. We show that a model with high MCSB ability performs much better with the natural approach than with the traditional approach across 20 diverse datasets and largely closes the gap with the SOTA, suggesting that the MCQA ability of LLMs has been previously underestimated.
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Combating misinformation in the age of LLMs: Opportunities and challenges
Abstract Misinformation such as fake news and rumors is a serious threat for information ecosystems and public trust. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has great potential to reshape the landscape of combating misinformation. Generally, LLMs can be a double‐edged sword in the fight. On the one hand, LLMs bring promising opportunities for combating misinformation due to their profound world knowledge and strong reasoning abilities. Thus, one emerging question is:can we utilize LLMs to combat misinformation?On the other hand, the critical challenge is that LLMs can be easily leveraged to generate deceptive misinformation at scale. Then, another important question is:how to combat LLM‐generated misinformation?In this paper, we first systematically review the history of combating misinformation before the advent of LLMs. Then we illustrate the current efforts and present an outlook for these two fundamental questions, respectively. The goal of this survey paper is to facilitate the progress of utilizing LLMs for fighting misinformation and call for interdisciplinary efforts from different stakeholders for combating LLM‐generated misinformation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2241068
- PAR ID:
- 10544410
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AI Magazine
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0738-4602
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 354-368
- Size(s):
- p. 354-368
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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