Model editing has emerged as a cost-effective strategy to update knowledge stored in language models. However, model editing can have unintended consequences after edits are applied: information unrelated to the edits can also be changed, and other general behaviors of the model can be wrongly altered. In this work, we investigate how model editing methods unexpectedly amplify model biases post-edit. We introduce a novel benchmark dataset, Seesaw-CF, for measuring bias-related harms of model editing and conduct the first in-depth investigation of how different weight-editing methods impact model bias. Specifically, we focus on biases with respect to demographic attributes such as race, geographic origin, and gender, as well as qualitative flaws in long-form texts generated by edited language models. We find that edited models exhibit, to various degrees, more biased behavior as they become less confident in attributes for Asian, African, and South American subjects. Furthermore, edited models amplify sexism and xenophobia in text generations while remaining seemingly coherent and logical. Finally, editing facts about place of birth, country of citizenship, or gender have particularly negative effects on the model's knowledge about unrelated features like field of work.

Despite extensive research on training generative adversarial networks (GANs) with limited training data, learning to generate images from long-tailed training distributions remains fairly unexplored. In the presence of imbalanced multi-class training data, GANs tend to favor classes with more samples, leading to the generation of low-quality and less diverse samples in tail classes. In this study, we aim to improve the training of class-conditional GANs with long-tailed data. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for knowledge sharing, allowing tail classes to borrow from the rich information from classes with more abundant training data. More concretely, we propose modifications to existing class-conditional GAN architectures to ensure that the lower-resolution layers of the generator are trained entirely unconditionally while reserving class-conditional generation for the higher-resolution layers. Experiments on several long-tail benchmarks and GAN architectures demonstrate a significant improvement over existing methods in both the diversity and fidelity of the generated images. The code is available at https://github.com/khorrams/utlo.

The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.

Large Language Models (LLMs) need to be aligned with human expectations to ensure their safety and utility in most applications. Alignment is challenging, costly, and needs to be repeated for every LLM and alignment criterion. We propose to decouple LLMs and alignment by training aligner models that can be used to align any LLM for a given criteria on an as-needed basis, thus also reducing the potential negative impacts of alignment on performance. Our recipe for training the aligner models solely relies on synthetic data generated with a (prompted) LLM and can be easily adjusted for a variety of alignment criteria. We use the same synthetic data to train inspectors, binary miss-alignment classification models to guide a "squad" of multiple aligners. Our empirical results demonstrate consistent improvements when applying aligner squad to various LLMs, including chat-aligned models, across several instruction-following and red-teaming datasets.

Kullback-Leiber divergence has been widely used in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to compress Large Language Models (LLMs). Contrary to prior assertions that reverse Kullback-Leibler (RKL) divergence is mode-seeking and thus preferable over the mean-seeking forward Kullback-Leibler (FKL) divergence, this study empirically and theoretically demonstrates that neither mode-seeking nor mean-seeking properties manifest in KD for LLMs. Instead, RKL and FKL are found to share the same optimization objective and both converge after a sufficient number of epochs. However, due to practical constraints, LLMs are seldom trained for such an extensive number of epochs. Meanwhile, we further find that RKL focuses on the tail part of the distributions, while FKL focuses on the head part at the beginning epochs. Consequently, we propose a simple yet effective Adaptive Kullback-Leiber (AKL) divergence method, which adaptively allocates weights to combine FKL and RKL. Metric-based and GPT-4-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed AKL outperforms the baselines across various tasks and improves the diversity and quality of generated responses.

Indirect User Requests (IURs), such as "It's cold in here" instead of "Could you please increase the temperature?" are common in human-human task-oriented dialogue and require world knowledge and pragmatic reasoning from the listener. While large language models (LLMs) can handle these requests effectively, smaller models deployed on virtual assistants often struggle due to resource constraints. Moreover, existing task-oriented dialogue benchmarks lack sufficient examples of complex discourse phenomena such as indirectness. To address this, we propose a set of linguistic criteria along with an LLM-based pipeline for generating realistic IURs to test natural language understanding (NLU) and dialogue state tracking (DST) models before deployment in a new domain. We also release IndirectRequests, a dataset of IURs based on the Schema Guided Dialog (SGD) corpus, as a comparative testbed for evaluating the performance of smaller models in handling indirect requests.

The desire and ability to seek new information strategically are fundamental to human learning but often overlooked in current language agent evaluation. We analyze a popular web shopping task designed to test language agents' ability to perform strategic exploration and discover that it can be reformulated and solved as a single-turn retrieval task without the need for interactive information seeking. This finding encourages us to rethink realistic constraints on information access that would necessitate strategic information seeking. We then redesign the task to introduce a notion of task ambiguity and the role of a shopper, serving as a dynamic party with whom the agent strategically interacts in an open-ended conversation to make informed decisions. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed task can effectively evaluate the agent's ability to explore and gradually accumulate information through multi-turn interactions. Additionally, we show that large language model-simulated shoppers serve as a good proxy for real human shoppers, revealing similar error patterns in agents.

Recent pandemics have highlighted vulnerabilities in our global economic systems, especially supply chains. Possible future pandemic raises a dilemma for businesses owners between short-term profitability and long-term supply chain resilience planning. In this study, we propose a novel agent-based simulation model integrating extended Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemiological model and supply and demand economic model to evaluate supply chain resilience strategies during pandemics. Using this model, we explore a range of supply chain resilience strategies under pandemic scenarios using in silico experiments. We find that a balanced approach to supply chain resilience performs better in both pandemic and non-pandemic times compared to extreme strategies, highlighting the importance of preparedness in the form of a better supply chain resilience. However, our analysis shows that the exact supply chain resilience strategy is hard to obtain for each firm and is relatively sensitive to the exact profile of the pandemic and economic state at the beginning of the pandemic. As such, we used a machine learning model that uses the agent-based simulation to estimate a near-optimal supply chain resilience strategy for a firm. The proposed model offers insights for policymakers and businesses to enhance supply chain resilience in the face of future pandemics, contributing to understanding the trade-offs between short-term gains and long-term sustainability in supply chain management before and during pandemics.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in many natural language processing tasks. However, our experiment reveals that, in stance detection tasks, LLMs may generate biased stances due to sentiment-stance spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics, thus harming their performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to Mitigate Biases of LLMs in stance detection with Calibration (MB-Cal). To be specific, a novel calibration network is devised to calibrate potential bias in the stance prediction of LLMs. Further, to address the challenge of effectively learning bias representations and the difficulty in the generalizability of debiasing, we construct counterfactual augmented data. This approach enhances the calibration network, facilitating the debiasing and out-of-domain generalization. Experimental results on in-target and zero-shot stance detection tasks show that the proposed MB-Cal can effectively mitigate biases of LLMs, achieving state-of-the-art results.

In his classic novel, 1984, George Orwell imagined how Britain might one day become a totalitarian surveillance state. Yet as Orwell's novel celebrates its 75th anniversary this month, British police are already deploying technologies that would put Big Brother to shame. From the facial recognition cameras watching you shop to the algorithms predicting crimes before they happen, these tools feel as if they've been ripped from the pages of science fiction. But there is nothing fictional about the AI cops already patrolling Britain's streets - and experts say there is only more to come. Jake Hufurt, head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch, warned MailOnline: 'We're sleepwalking into a high-tech police state.'