The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought about remarkable generative capabilities but also raised concerns about their potential misuse. While strategies like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback have enhanced their safety, these methods primarily focus on natural languages, which may not generalize to other domains. This paper introduces CodeAttack, a framework that transforms natural language inputs into code inputs, presenting a novel environment for testing the safety generalization of LLMs. Our comprehensive studies on state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-4, Claude-2, and Llama-2 series reveal a new and universal safety vulnerability of these models against code input: CodeAttack bypasses the safety guardrails of all models more than 80% of the time. We find that a larger distribution gap between CodeAttack and natural language leads to weaker safety generalization, such as encoding natural language input with data structures. Furthermore, we give our hypotheses about the success of CodeAttack: the misaligned bias acquired by LLMs during code training, prioritizing code completion over avoiding the potential safety risk. Finally, we analyze potential mitigation measures. These findings highlight new safety risks in the code domain and the need for more robust safety alignment algorithms to match the code capabilities of LLMs.

Discourse analysis has long been known to be fundamental in natural language processing. In this research, we present our insight on discourse-level topic chain (DTC) parsing which aims at discovering new topics and investigating how these topics evolve over time within an article. To address the lack of data, we contribute a new discourse corpus with DTC-style dependency graphs annotated upon news articles. In particular, we ensure the high reliability of the corpus by utilizing a two-step annotation strategy to build the data and filtering out the annotations with low confidence scores. Based on the annotated corpus, we introduce a simple yet robust system for automatic discourse-level topic chain parsing.

Natural language generation (NLG) tasks on pro-drop languages are known to suffer from zero pronoun (ZP) problems, and the problems remain challenging due to the scarcity of ZP-annotated NLG corpora. In this case, we propose a highly adaptive two-stage approach to couple context modeling with ZP recovering to mitigate the ZP problem in NLG tasks. Notably, we frame the recovery process in a task-supervised fashion where the ZP representation recovering capability is learned during the NLG task learning process, thus our method does not require NLG corpora annotated with ZPs. For system enhancement, we learn an adversarial bot to adjust our model outputs to alleviate the error propagation caused by mis-recovered ZPs. Experiments on three document-level NLG tasks, i.e., machine translation, question answering, and summarization, show that our approach can improve the performance to a great extent, and the improvement on pronoun translation is very impressive.

Document-level machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to the difficulty in efficiently using document context for translation. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model to learn the global context for document-level neural machine translation (NMT). This is done through a sentence encoder to capture intra-sentence dependencies and a document encoder to model document-level inter-sentence consistency and coherence. With this hierarchical architecture, we feedback the extracted global document context to each word in a top-down fashion to distinguish different translations of a word according to its specific surrounding context. In addition, since large-scale in-domain document-level parallel corpora are usually unavailable, we use a two-step training strategy to take advantage of a large-scale corpus with out-of-domain parallel sentence pairs and a small-scale corpus with in-domain parallel document pairs to achieve the domain adaptability. Experimental results on several benchmark corpora show that our proposed model can significantly improve document-level translation performance over several strong NMT baselines.