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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gupta, Akash, Sheth, Ivaxi, Raina, Vyas, Gales, Mark, Fritz, Mario
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18216
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author Gupta, Akash
Sheth, Ivaxi
Raina, Vyas
Gales, Mark
Fritz, Mario
author_facet Gupta, Akash
Sheth, Ivaxi
Raina, Vyas
Gales, Mark
Fritz, Mario
contents With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18216
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Task Interference: An Initial Study on the Impact of Task-Switch in Conversational History
Gupta, Akash
Sheth, Ivaxi
Raina, Vyas
Gales, Mark
Fritz, Mario
Computation and Language
With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.
title LLM Task Interference: An Initial Study on the Impact of Task-Switch in Conversational History
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18216