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A Career Interview Dialogue System using Large Language Model-based Dynamic Slot Generation
Hashimoto, Ekai, Nakano, Mikio, Sakurai, Takayoshi, Shiramatsu, Shun, Komazaki, Toshitake, Tsuchiya, Shiho
This study aims to improve the efficiency and quality of career interviews conducted by nursing managers. To this end, we have been developing a slot-filling dialogue system that engages in pre-interviews to collect information on staff careers as a preparatory step before the actual interviews. Conventional slot-filling-based interview dialogue systems have limitations in the flexibility of information collection because the dialogue progresses based on predefined slot sets. We therefore propose a method that leverages large language models (LLMs) to dynamically generate new slots according to the flow of the dialogue, achieving more natural conversations. Furthermore, we incorporate abduction into the slot generation process to enable more appropriate and effective slot generation. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted experiments using a user simulator. The results suggest that the proposed method using abduction is effective in enhancing both information-collecting capabilities and the naturalness of the dialogue.
Does calibration mean what they say it means; or, the reference class problem rises again
Discussions of statistical criteria for fairness commonly convey the normative significance of calibration within groups by invoking what risk scores "mean." On the Same Meaning picture, group-calibrated scores "mean the same thing" (on average) across individuals from different groups and accordingly, guard against disparate treatment of individuals based on group membership. My contention is that calibration guarantees no such thing. Since concrete actual people belong to many groups, calibration cannot ensure the kind of consistent score interpretation that the Same Meaning picture implies matters for fairness, unless calibration is met within every group to which an individual belongs. Alas only perfect predictors may meet this bar. The Same Meaning picture thus commits a reference class fallacy by inferring from calibration within some group to the "meaning" or evidential value of an individual's score, because they are a member of that group. Furthermore, the reference class answer it presumes is almost surely wrong. I then show that the reference class problem besets not just calibration but all group statistical facts that claim a close connection to fairness. Reflecting on the origins of this error opens a wider lens onto the predominant methodology in algorithmic fairness based on stylized cases.
STAMPsy: Towards SpatioTemporal-Aware Mixed-Type Dialogues for Psychological Counseling
Wang, Jieyi, Huang, Yue, Liu, Zeming, Xu, Dexuan, Wang, Chuan, Shi, Xiaoming, Guan, Ruiyuan, Wang, Hongxing, Yue, Weihua, Huang, Yu
Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic dialogue or QA with minimal professional knowledge and without goal guidance. In many real-world counseling scenarios, clients often seek multi-type help, such as diagnosis, consultation, therapy, console, and common questions, but existing dialogue systems struggle to combine different dialogue types naturally. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct mixed-type dialogue systems for psychological counseling that enable clients to clarify their goals before proceeding with counseling. To mitigate the challenge, we collect a mixed-type counseling dialogues corpus termed STAMPsy, covering five dialogue types, task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, knowledge-grounded dialogue, conversational recommendation, empathetic dialogue, and question answering, over 5,000 conversations. Moreover, spatiotemporal-aware knowledge enables systems to have world awareness and has been proven to affect one's mental health. Therefore, we link dialogues in STAMPsy to spatiotemporal state and propose a spatiotemporal-aware mixed-type psychological counseling dataset. Additionally, we build baselines on STAMPsy and develop an iterative self-feedback psychological dialogue generation framework, named Self-STAMPsy. Results indicate that clarifying dialogue goals in advance and utilizing spatiotemporal states are effective.
MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineering
Chan, Jun Shern, Chowdhury, Neil, Jaffe, Oliver, Aung, James, Sherburn, Dane, Mays, Evan, Starace, Giulio, Liu, Kevin, Maksin, Leon, Patwardhan, Tejal, Weng, Lilian, Mฤ dry, Aleksander
We introduce MLE-bench, a benchmark for measuring how well AI agents perform at machine learning engineering. To this end, we curate 75 ML engineering-related competitions from Kaggle, creating a diverse set of challenging tasks that test real-world ML engineering skills such as training models, preparing datasets, and running experiments. We establish human baselines for each competition using Kaggle's publicly available leaderboards. We use open-source agent scaffolds to evaluate several frontier language models on our benchmark, finding that the best-performing setup--OpenAI's o1-preview with AIDE scaffolding--achieves at least the level of a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions. In addition to our main results, we investigate various forms of resource scaling for AI agents and the impact of contamination from pre-training. We open-source our benchmark code (github.com/openai/mle-bench/) to facilitate future research in understanding the ML engineering capabilities of AI agents.
Logical Consistency of Large Language Models in Fact-checking
Ghosh, Bishwamittra, Hasan, Sarah, Arafat, Naheed Anjum, Khan, Arijit
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success in performing varied natural language tasks such as language translation, question-answering, summarizing, fact-checking, etc. Despite LLMs' impressive ability to generate human-like texts, LLMs are infamous for their inconsistent responses -- a meaning-preserving change in the input query results in an inconsistent response and attributes to vulnerabilities of LLMs such as hallucination, jailbreaking, etc. Consequently, existing research focuses on simple paraphrasing-based consistency assessment of LLMs, and ignores complex queries that necessitates an even better understanding of logical reasoning by an LLM. Our work therefore addresses the logical inconsistency of LLMs under complex logical queries with primitive logical operators, e.g., negation, conjunction, and disjunction. As a test bed, we consider retrieval-augmented LLMs on a fact-checking task involving propositional logic queries from real-world knowledge graphs (KGs). Our contributions are three-fold. Benchmark: We introduce three logical fact-checking datasets over KGs for community development towards logically consistent LLMs. Assessment: We propose consistency measures of LLMs on propositional logic queries as input and demonstrate that existing LLMs lack logical consistency, specially on complex queries. Improvement: We employ supervised fine-tuning to improve the logical consistency of LLMs on the complex fact-checking task with KG contexts.
The Evolution of LLM Adoption in Industry Data Curation Practices
Qian, Crystal, Liu, Michael Xieyang, Reif, Emily, Simon, Grady, Hussein, Nada, Clement, Nathan, Wexler, James, Cai, Carrie J., Terry, Michael, Kahng, Minsuk
As large language models (LLMs) grow increasingly adept at processing unstructured text data, they offer new opportunities to enhance data curation workflows. This paper explores the evolution of LLM adoption among practitioners at a large technology company, evaluating the impact of LLMs in data curation tasks through participants' perceptions, integration strategies, and reported usage scenarios. Through a series of surveys, interviews, and user studies, we provide a timely snapshot of how organizations are navigating a pivotal moment in LLM evolution. In Q2 2023, we conducted a survey to assess LLM adoption in industry for development tasks (N=84), and facilitated expert interviews to assess evolving data needs (N=10) in Q3 2023. In Q2 2024, we explored practitioners' current and anticipated LLM usage through a user study involving two LLM-based prototypes (N=12). While each study addressed distinct research goals, they revealed a broader narrative about evolving LLM usage in aggregate. We discovered an emerging shift in data understanding from heuristic-first, bottom-up approaches to insights-first, top-down workflows supported by LLMs. Furthermore, to respond to a more complex data landscape, data practitioners now supplement traditional subject-expert-created 'golden datasets' with LLM-generated 'silver' datasets and rigorously validated 'super golden' datasets curated by diverse experts. This research sheds light on the transformative role of LLMs in large-scale analysis of unstructured data and highlights opportunities for further tool development.
Measuring, Modeling, and Helping People Account for Privacy Risks in Online Self-Disclosures with AI
Krsek, Isadora, Kabra, Anubha, Dou, Yao, Naous, Tarek, Dabbish, Laura A., Ritter, Alan, Xu, Wei, Das, Sauvik
In pseudonymous online fora like Reddit, the benefits of self-disclosure are often apparent to users (e.g., I can vent about my in-laws to understanding strangers), but the privacy risks are more abstract (e.g., will my partner be able to tell that this is me?). Prior work has sought to develop natural language processing (NLP) tools that help users identify potentially risky self-disclosures in their text, but none have been designed for or evaluated with the users they hope to protect. Absent this assessment, these tools will be limited by the social-technical gap: users need assistive tools that help them make informed decisions, not paternalistic tools that tell them to avoid self-disclosure altogether. To bridge this gap, we conducted a study with N = 21 Reddit users; we had them use a state-of-the-art NLP disclosure detection model on two of their authored posts and asked them questions to understand if and how the model helped, where it fell short, and how it could be improved to help them make more informed decisions. Despite its imperfections, users responded positively to the model and highlighted its use as a tool that can help them catch mistakes, inform them of risks they were unaware of, and encourage self-reflection. However, our work also shows how, to be useful and usable, AI for supporting privacy decision-making must account for posting context, disclosure norms, and users' lived threat models, and provide explanations that help contextualize detected risks.
Beyond the Hype: A Comprehensive Review of Current Trends in Generative AI Research, Teaching Practices, and Tools
Prather, James, Leinonen, Juho, Kiesler, Natalie, Benario, Jamie Gorson, Lau, Sam, MacNeil, Stephen, Norouzi, Narges, Opel, Simone, Pettit, Vee, Porter, Leo, Reeves, Brent N., Savelka, Jaromir, Smith, David H. IV, Strickroth, Sven, Zingaro, Daniel
Generative AI (GenAI) is advancing rapidly, and the literature in computing education is expanding almost as quickly. Initial responses to GenAI tools were mixed between panic and utopian optimism. Many were fast to point out the opportunities and challenges of GenAI. Researchers reported that these new tools are capable of solving most introductory programming tasks and are causing disruptions throughout the curriculum. These tools can write and explain code, enhance error messages, create resources for instructors, and even provide feedback and help for students like a traditional teaching assistant. In 2024, new research started to emerge on the effects of GenAI usage in the computing classroom. These new data involve the use of GenAI to support classroom instruction at scale and to teach students how to code with GenAI. In support of the former, a new class of tools is emerging that can provide personalized feedback to students on their programming assignments or teach both programming and prompting skills at the same time. With the literature expanding so rapidly, this report aims to summarize and explain what is happening on the ground in computing classrooms. We provide a systematic literature review; a survey of educators and industry professionals; and interviews with educators using GenAI in their courses, educators studying GenAI, and researchers who create GenAI tools to support computing education. The triangulation of these methods and data sources expands the understanding of GenAI usage and perceptions at this critical moment for our community.
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization
Wu, Jiayi, Cai, Hengyi, Yan, Lingyong, Sun, Hao, Li, Xiang, Wang, Shuaiqiang, Yin, Dawei, Gao, Ming
The emergence of Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has alleviated the issues of outdated and hallucinatory content in the generation of large language models (LLMs), yet it still reveals numerous limitations. When a general-purpose LLM serves as the RAG generator, it often suffers from inadequate response informativeness, response robustness, and citation quality. Past approaches to tackle these limitations, either by incorporating additional steps beyond generating responses or optimizing the generator through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), still failed to align with the RAG requirement thoroughly. Consequently, optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives while maintaining its end-to-end LLM form remains a challenge. To bridge this gap, we propose Multiple Perspective Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (PA-RAG), a method for optimizing the generator of RAG systems to align with RAG requirements comprehensively. Specifically, we construct high-quality instruction fine-tuning data and multi-perspective preference data by sampling varied quality responses from the generator across different prompt documents quality scenarios. Subsequently, we optimize the generator using SFT and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments conducted on four question-answer datasets across three LLMs demonstrate that PA-RAG can significantly enhance the performance of RAG generators. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/wujwyi/PA-RAG.
PsyDT: Using LLMs to Construct the Digital Twin of Psychological Counselor with Personalized Counseling Style for Psychological Counseling
Xie, Haojie, Chen, Yirong, Xing, Xiaofen, Lin, Jingkai, Xu, Xiangmin
Currently, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in the field of psychological counseling. However, existing mental health LLMs overlook a critical issue where they do not consider the fact that different psychological counselors exhibit different personal styles, including linguistic style and therapy techniques, etc. As a result, these LLMs fail to satisfy the individual needs of clients who seek different counseling styles. To help bridge this gap, we propose PsyDT, a novel framework using LLMs to construct the Digital Twin of Psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Compared to the time-consuming and costly approach of collecting a large number of real-world counseling cases to create a specific counselor's digital twin, our framework offers a faster and more cost-effective solution. To construct PsyDT, we utilize dynamic one-shot learning by using GPT-4 to capture counselor's unique counseling style, mainly focusing on linguistic style and therapy techniques. Subsequently, using existing single-turn long-text dialogues with client's questions, GPT-4 is guided to synthesize multi-turn dialogues of specific counselor. Finally, we fine-tune the LLMs on the synthetic dataset, PsyDTCorpus, to achieve the digital twin of psychological counselor with personalized counseling style. Experimental results indicate that our proposed PsyDT framework can synthesize multi-turn dialogues that closely resemble real-world counseling cases and demonstrate better performance compared to other baselines, thereby show that our framework can effectively construct the digital twin of psychological counselor with a specific counseling style.