South America
From Stem to Stern: Contestability Along AI Value Chains
Balayn, Agathe, Pi, Yulu, Widder, David Gray, Alfrink, Kars, Yurrita, Mireia, Upadhyay, Sohini, Karusala, Naveena, Lyons, Henrietta, Turkay, Cagatay, Tessono, Christelle, Attard-Frost, Blair, Gadiraju, Ujwal
This workshop will grow and consolidate a community of interdisciplinary CSCW researchers focusing on the topic of contestable AI. As an outcome of the workshop, we will synthesize the most pressing opportunities and challenges for contestability along AI value chains in the form of a research roadmap. This roadmap will help shape and inspire imminent work in this field. Considering the length and depth of AI value chains, it will especially spur discussions around the contestability of AI systems along various sites of such chains. The workshop will serve as a platform for dialogue and demonstrations of concrete, successful, and unsuccessful examples of AI systems that (could or should) have been contested, to identify requirements, obstacles, and opportunities for designing and deploying contestable AI in various contexts. This will be held primarily as an in-person workshop, with some hybrid accommodation. The day will consist of individual presentations and group activities to stimulate ideation and inspire broad reflections on the field of contestable AI. Our aim is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders to foster the design and deployment of contestable AI.
The Mismeasure of Man and Models: Evaluating Allocational Harms in Large Language Models
Chen, Hannah, Ji, Yangfeng, Evans, David
Large language models (LLMs) are now being considered and even deployed for applications that support high-stakes decision-making, such as recruitment and clinical decisions. While several methods have been proposed for measuring bias, there remains a gap between predictions, which are what the proposed methods consider, and how they are used to make decisions. In this work, we introduce Rank-Allocational-Based Bias Index (RABBI), a model-agnostic bias measure that assesses potential allocational harms arising from biases in LLM predictions. We compare RABBI and current bias metrics on two allocation decision tasks. We evaluate their predictive validity across ten LLMs and utility for model selection. Our results reveal that commonly-used bias metrics based on average performance gap and distribution distance fail to reliably capture group disparities in allocation outcomes, whereas RABBI exhibits a strong correlation with allocation disparities. Our work highlights the need to account for how models are used in contexts with limited resource constraints.
The Quest for the Right Mediator: A History, Survey, and Theoretical Grounding of Causal Interpretability
Mueller, Aaron, Brinkmann, Jannik, Li, Millicent, Marks, Samuel, Pal, Koyena, Prakash, Nikhil, Rager, Can, Sankaranarayanan, Aruna, Sharma, Arnab Sen, Sun, Jiuding, Todd, Eric, Bau, David, Belinkov, Yonatan
Interpretability provides a toolset for understanding how and why neural networks behave in certain ways. However, there is little unity in the field: most studies employ ad-hoc evaluations and do not share theoretical foundations, making it difficult to measure progress and compare the pros and cons of different techniques. Furthermore, while mechanistic understanding is frequently discussed, the basic causal units underlying these mechanisms are often not explicitly defined. In this paper, we propose a perspective on interpretability research grounded in causal mediation analysis. Specifically, we describe the history and current state of interpretability taxonomized according to the types of causal units (mediators) employed, as well as methods used to search over mediators. We discuss the pros and cons of each mediator, providing insights as to when particular kinds of mediators and search methods are most appropriate depending on the goals of a given study. We argue that this framing yields a more cohesive narrative of the field, as well as actionable insights for future work. Specifically, we recommend a focus on discovering new mediators with better trade-offs between human-interpretability and compute-efficiency, and which can uncover more sophisticated abstractions from neural networks than the primarily linear mediators employed in current work. We also argue for more standardized evaluations that enable principled comparisons across mediator types, such that we can better understand when particular causal units are better suited to particular use cases.
Trustworthy Machine Learning under Social and Adversarial Data Sources
Machine learning has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in recent years. As machine learning permeates various aspects of daily life, individuals and organizations increasingly interact with these systems, exhibiting a wide range of social and adversarial behaviors. These behaviors may have a notable impact on the behavior and performance of machine learning systems. Specifically, during these interactions, data may be generated by strategic individuals, collected by self-interested data collectors, possibly poisoned by adversarial attackers, and used to create predictors, models, and policies satisfying multiple objectives. As a result, the machine learning systems' outputs might degrade, such as the susceptibility of deep neural networks to adversarial examples (Shafahi et al., 2018; Szegedy et al., 2013) and the diminished performance of classic algorithms in the presence of strategic individuals (Ahmadi et al., 2021). Addressing these challenges is imperative for the success of machine learning in societal settings.
Detection and Characterization of Coordinated Online Behavior: A Survey
Mannocci, Lorenzo, Mazza, Michele, Monreale, Anna, Tesconi, Maurizio, Cresci, Stefano
Coordination is a fundamental aspect of life. The advent of social media has made it integral also to online human interactions, such as those that characterize thriving online communities and social movements. At the same time, coordination is also core to effective disinformation, manipulation, and hate campaigns. This survey collects, categorizes, and critically discusses the body of work produced as a result of the growing interest on coordinated online behavior. We reconcile industry and academic definitions, propose a comprehensive framework to study coordinated online behavior, and review and critically discuss the existing detection and characterization methods. Our analysis identifies open challenges and promising directions of research, serving as a guide for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in understanding and addressing the complexities inherent to online coordination.
DebateQA: Evaluating Question Answering on Debatable Knowledge
Xu, Rongwu, Qi, Xuan, Qi, Zehan, Xu, Wei, Guo, Zhijiang
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled us to seek answers to inherently debatable questions on LLM chatbots, necessitating a reliable way to evaluate their ability. However, traditional QA benchmarks assume fixed answers are inadequate for this purpose. To address this, we introduce DebateQA, a dataset of 2,941 debatable questions, each accompanied by multiple human-annotated partial answers that capture a variety of perspectives. We develop two metrics: Perspective Diversity, which evaluates the comprehensiveness of perspectives, and Dispute Awareness, which assesses if the LLM acknowledges the question's debatable nature. Experiments demonstrate that both metrics align with human preferences and are stable across different underlying models. Using DebateQA with two metrics, we assess 12 popular LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation methods. Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally excel at recognizing debatable issues, their ability to provide comprehensive answers encompassing diverse perspectives varies considerably.
Real-life Minority Report: Argentina will use AI to 'predict future crimes'
Argentinian security forces have announced plans to use artificial intelligence to'predict future crimes' but experts warn the move could threaten citizens' rights. Far-right president Javier Milei has created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit which will use algorithms to analyse historical crime data. The data produced will then be used to predict future crimes, The Guardian has reported. The security unit is also expected to be able to use facial recognition software to track down wanted persons and detect suspicious activity. However, the Minority Report-esque resolution has concerned human rights campaigners who fear certain groups in society may be over-scrutinised by the AI technology.
Argentina will use AI to 'predict future crimes' but experts worry for citizens' rights
Argentina's security forces have announced plans to use artificial intelligence to "predict future crimes" in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens' rights. The country's far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use "machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes". It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify "wanted persons", patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities. While the ministry of security has said the new unit will help to "detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances", the Minority Report-esque resolution has sent alarm bells ringing among human rights organisations. Experts fear that certain groups of society could be overly scrutinised by the technology, and have also raised concerns over who โ and how many security forces โ will be able to access the information.
Risks, Causes, and Mitigations of Widespread Deployments of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Survey
Sakib, Md Nazmus, Islam, Md Athikul, Pathak, Royal, Arifin, Md Mashrur
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, have significantly transformed Natural Language Processing (NLP) with their outstanding abilities in text generation, summarization, and classification. Nevertheless, their widespread adoption introduces numerous challenges, including issues related to academic integrity, copyright, environmental impacts, and ethical considerations such as data bias, fairness, and privacy. The rapid evolution of LLMs also raises concerns regarding the reliability and generalizability of their evaluations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of the literature on these subjects, systematically gathered and synthesized from Google Scholar. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of the risks associated with specific LLMs, identifying sub-risks, their causes, and potential solutions. Furthermore, we explore the broader challenges related to LLMs, detailing their causes and proposing mitigation strategies. Through this literature analysis, our survey aims to deepen the understanding of the implications and complexities surrounding these powerful models.
PERSOMA: PERsonalized SOft ProMpt Adapter Architecture for Personalized Language Prompting
Hebert, Liam, Sayana, Krishna, Jash, Ambarish, Karatzoglou, Alexandros, Sodhi, Sukhdeep, Doddapaneni, Sumanth, Cai, Yanli, Kuzmin, Dima
Understanding the nuances of a user's extensive interaction history is key to building accurate and personalized natural language systems that can adapt to evolving user preferences. To address this, we introduce PERSOMA, Personalized Soft Prompt Adapter architecture. Unlike previous personalized prompting methods for large language models, PERSOMA offers a novel approach to efficiently capture user history. It achieves this by resampling and compressing interactions as free form text into expressive soft prompt embeddings, building upon recent research utilizing embedding representations as input for LLMs. We rigorously validate our approach by evaluating various adapter architectures, first-stage sampling strategies, parameter-efficient tuning techniques like LoRA, and other personalization methods. Our results demonstrate PERSOMA's superior ability to handle large and complex user histories compared to existing embedding-based and text-prompt-based techniques.