Uncovering latent values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by presenting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying their stances towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

Natural language question answering (QA) over structured data sources such as tables and knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely investigated, for example with Large Language Models (LLMs). The main solutions include question to formal query parsing and retrieval-based answer generation. However, current methods of the former often suffer from weak generalization, failing to dealing with multiple sources simultaneously, while the later is limited in trustfulness. In this paper, we propose UnifiedTQA, a trustful QA framework that can simultaneously support multiple types of structured data in a unified way. To this end, it adopts an LLM-friendly and unified knowledge representation method called Condition Graph (CG), and uses an LLM and demonstration-based two-level method for CG querying. For enhancement, it is also equipped with dynamic demonstration retrieval. We have evaluated UnifiedTQA with 5 benchmarks covering 3 types of structured data. It outperforms 2 existing unified structured data QA methods and in comparison with the baselines that are specific to a data type, it achieves state-of-the-art on 2 of them. Further more, we demonstrates potential of our method for more general QA tasks, QA over mixed structured data and QA across structured data.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can alleviate hallucinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) by referencing external documents. However, the misinformation in external documents may mislead LLMs' generation. To address this issue, we explore the task of "credibility-aware RAG", in which LLMs automatically adjust the influence of retrieved documents based on their credibility scores to counteract misinformation. To this end, we introduce a plug-and-play method named $\textbf{Cr}$edibility-aware $\textbf{A}$ttention $\textbf{M}$odification (CrAM). CrAM identifies influential attention heads in LLMs and adjusts their attention weights based on the credibility of the documents, thereby reducing the impact of low-credibility documents. Experiments on Natual Questions and TriviaQA using Llama2-13B, Llama3-8B, and Qwen-7B show that CrAM improves the RAG performance of LLMs against misinformation pollution by over 20%, even surpassing supervised fine-tuning methods.

We introduce AudioBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate audio large language models (AudioLLMs). AudioBench encompasses 8 distinct tasks and 26 carefully selected or newly curated datasets, focusing on speech understanding, voice interpretation, and audio scene understanding. Despite the rapid advancement of large language models, including multimodal versions, a significant gap exists in comprehensive benchmarks for thoroughly evaluating their capabilities. AudioBench addresses this gap by providing relevant datasets and evaluation metrics. In our study, we evaluated the capabilities of four models across various aspects and found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks. We outline the research outlook for AudioLLMs and anticipate that our open-source code, data, and leaderboard will offer a robust testbed for future model developments.

Achieving global space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) access only with CubeSats presents significant challenges such as the access sustainability limitations in specific regions (e.g., polar regions) and the energy efficiency limitations in CubeSats. To tackle these problems, high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (HALE-UAVs) can complement these CubeSat shortcomings for providing cooperatively global access sustainability and energy efficiency. However, as the number of CubeSats and HALE-UAVs, increases, the scheduling dimension of each ground station (GS) increases. As a result, each GS can fall into the curse of dimensionality, and this challenge becomes one major hurdle for efficient global access. Therefore, this paper provides a quantum multi-agent reinforcement Learning (QMARL)-based method for scheduling between GSs and CubeSats/HALE-UAVs in order to improve global access availability and energy efficiency. The main reason why the QMARL-based scheduler can be beneficial is that the algorithm facilitates a logarithmic-scale reduction in scheduling action dimensions, which is one critical feature as the number of CubeSats and HALE-UAVs expands. Additionally, individual GSs have different traffic demands depending on their locations and characteristics, thus it is essential to provide differentiated access services. The superiority of the proposed scheduler is validated through data-intensive experiments in realistic CubeSat/HALE-UAV settings.

Hanging on the wall of Anthropic's offices in San Francisco in early May, a stone's throw from the conference room where CEO Dario Amodei would shortly sit for an interview with TIME, was a framed meme. Its single panel showed a giant robot ransacking a burning city. Underneath, the image's tongue-in-cheek title: Deep learning is hitting a wall. That's a refrain you often hear from AI skeptics, who claim that rapid progress in artificial intelligence will soon taper off. Another points to the devastated city: "wall."

In the midst of widespread misinformation and disinformation through social media and the proliferation of AI-generated texts, it has become increasingly difficult for people to validate and trust information they encounter. Many fact-checking approaches and tools have been developed, but they often lack appropriate explainability or granularity to be useful in various contexts. A text validation method that is easy to use, accessible, and can perform fine-grained evidence attribution has become crucial. More importantly, building user trust in such a method requires presenting the rationale behind each prediction, as research shows this significantly influences people's belief in automated systems. Localizing and bringing users' attention to the specific problematic content is also paramount, instead of providing simple blanket labels. In this paper, we present ClaimVer, a human-centric framework tailored to meet users' informational and verification needs by generating rich annotations and thereby reducing cognitive load. Designed to deliver comprehensive evaluations of texts, it highlights each claim, verifies it against a trusted knowledge graph (KG), presents the evidence, and provides succinct, clear explanations for each claim prediction. Finally, our framework introduces an attribution score, enhancing applicability across a wide range of downstream tasks.

In model-based reinforcement learning, simulated experiences from the learned model are often treated as equivalent to experience from the real environment. However, when the model is inaccurate, it can catastrophically interfere with policy learning. Alternatively, the agent might learn about the model's accuracy and selectively use it only when it can provide reliable predictions. We empirically explore model uncertainty measures for selective planning and show that best results require distribution insensitive inference to estimate the uncertainty over model-based updates. To that end, we propose and evaluate bounding-box inference, which operates on bounding-boxes around sets of possible states and other quantities. We find that bounding-box inference can reliably support effective selective planning.

Modern language models, while sophisticated, exhibit some inherent shortcomings, particularly in conversational settings. We claim that many of the observed shortcomings can be attributed to violation of one or more conversational principles. By drawing upon extensive research from both the social science and AI communities, we propose a set of maxims -- quantity, quality, relevance, manner, benevolence, and transparency -- for describing effective human-AI conversation. We first justify the applicability of the first four maxims (from Grice) in the context of human-AI interactions. We then argue that two new maxims, benevolence (concerning the generation of, and engagement with, harmful content) and transparency (concerning recognition of one's knowledge boundaries, operational constraints, and intents), are necessary for addressing behavior unique to modern human-AI interactions. We evaluate the degree to which various language models are able to understand these maxims and find that models possess an internal prioritization of principles that can significantly impact their ability to interpret the maxims accurately.

It's been a quiet week of news, but we've been feverishly testing Microsoft's new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot AI PCs. In this episode, Devindra and Sam will answer your questions about Microsoft's new hardware, and we'll deliver some of our first impressions. It turns out Microsoft may have finally gotten Windows on Arm support right! And some of the Copilot AI features are actually useful, surprisingly enough. But we'll have to wait a few months to test out the controversial Recall feature, which was pulled from the Copilot launch. Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News! Wired report: AI search engine Perplexity is ignoring robots.txt Listener question: What do you do with 8 gig fiber home internet? Joining me today is Senior Writer from Engadget, Sam Rutherford. I'm doing okay because we finally have some Copilot Plus PCs. Sam has the Surface Laptop, I have the Surface Pro. And we've just started testing these things. They came in late and we're just like trying to get Arubia as quickly as we can for both of us, but we've got some impressions here. We're going to be taking some questions from our live stream. Cause it's a pretty light news week, but yeah, if you join us Thursday mornings, around 10 30 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel. You too can participate and ask us questions. See us show off some gadgets. We'll show off some stuff live from the Surface Pro. So if you're listening to this in audio form, go back and watch the video, cause you can actually see us test out some features and show off the hardware too. As always folks, if you're enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to us in iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, leave us a review in iTunes. That's always super helpful and drop us [00:01:00]an email at podcast at engadget. Question for you, Sam, what was your first impression upon tearing open the Surface Laptop? Sam: Right away I think it's good they didn't mess with the design. The design was never the issue for the Surfaces, they're, very beautifully crafted. And, opening up and this is going to sound like silly, but it's it functioned exactly like a windows 11 laptop is supposed to. And that was like, Hey, this is actually an improvement from, previous attempts at windows on arm right away. It seems like they, Microsoft has nailed all the important aspects.