Government
Could YOU be an astronaut? As Emma Roberts stars as a NASA rookie in Amazon Prime's 'Space Cadet', take the test to see if you have what it takes to take the next giant leap for mankind
If you're subscribed to Amazon Prime Video, it's likely you've seen'Space Cadet' promoted at the top of your feed this week. The movie has raced to the top of the charts and sees Emma Roberts star as a trainee astronaut at NASA. In the film, Roberts' character, Rex, manages to make it on to NASA's training programme by faking her CV. However, in reality, it's much trickier to be selected, with just 360 lucky candidates making the cut at the US space agency since the 1960s. So, do you have what it takes to become an astonaut?
TechScape: Can AI really help fix a healthcare system in crisis?
What if we've been overstating its potential to a frankly dangerous degree? That's the concern of leading cancer experts in the NHS, who warn that the health service is obsessing over new tech to the point that it's putting patient safety at risk. In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that'novel solutions' such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as'magic bullets' for the cancer crisis, but'none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem'. A'common fallacy' of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create'additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy'.
Decoding Climate Disagreement: A Graph Neural Network-Based Approach to Understanding Social Media Dynamics
Su, Ruiran, Pierrehumbert, Janet B.
This work introduces the ClimateSent-GAT Model, an innovative method that integrates Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with techniques from natural language processing to accurately identify and predict disagreements within Reddit comment-reply pairs. Our model classifies disagreements into three categories: agree, disagree, and neutral. Leveraging the inherent graph structure of Reddit comment-reply pairs, the model significantly outperforms existing benchmarks by capturing complex interaction patterns and sentiment dynamics. This research advances graph-based NLP methodologies and provides actionable insights for policymakers and educators in climate science communication.
Weak baselines and reporting biases lead to overoptimism in machine learning for fluid-related partial differential equations
One of the most promising applications of machine learning (ML) in computational physics is to accelerate the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). The key objective of ML-based PDE solvers is to output a sufficiently accurate solution faster than standard numerical methods, which are used as a baseline comparison. We first perform a systematic review of the ML-for-PDE solving literature. Of articles that use ML to solve a fluid-related PDE and claim to outperform a standard numerical method, we determine that 79% (60/76) compare to a weak baseline. Second, we find evidence that reporting biases, especially outcome reporting bias and publication bias, are widespread. We conclude that ML-for-PDE solving research is overoptimistic: weak baselines lead to overly positive results, while reporting biases lead to underreporting of negative results. To a large extent, these issues appear to be caused by factors similar to those of past reproducibility crises: researcher degrees of freedom and a bias towards positive results. We call for bottom-up cultural changes to minimize biased reporting as well as top-down structural reforms intended to reduce perverse incentives for doing so.
Do Multilingual Large Language Models Mitigate Stereotype Bias?
Nie, Shangrui, Fromm, Michael, Welch, Charles, Görge, Rebekka, Karimi, Akbar, Plepi, Joan, Mowmita, Nazia Afsan, Flores-Herr, Nicolas, Ali, Mehdi, Flek, Lucie
While preliminary findings indicate that multilingual LLMs exhibit reduced bias compared to monolingual ones, a comprehensive understanding of the effect of multilingual training on bias mitigation, is lacking. This study addresses this gap by systematically training six LLMs of identical size (2.6B parameters) and architecture: five monolingual models (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish) and one multilingual model trained on an equal distribution of data across these languages, all using publicly available data. To ensure robust evaluation, standard bias benchmarks were automatically translated into the five target languages and verified for both translation quality and bias preservation by human annotators. Our results consistently demonstrate that multilingual training effectively mitigates bias. Moreover, we observe that multilingual models achieve not only lower bias but also superior prediction accuracy when compared to monolingual models with the same amount of training data, model architecture, and size.
Evaluating Human-AI Collaboration: A Review and Methodological Framework
Fragiadakis, George, Diou, Christos, Kousiouris, George, Nikolaidou, Mara
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in working environments with individuals, known as Human-AI Collaboration (HAIC), has become essential in a variety of domains, boosting decision-making, efficiency, and innovation. Despite HAIC's wide potential, evaluating its effectiveness remains challenging due to the complex interaction of components involved. This paper provides a detailed analysis of existing HAIC evaluation approaches and develops a fresh paradigm for more effectively evaluating these systems. Our framework includes a structured decision tree which assists to select relevant metrics based on distinct HAIC modes (AI-Centric, Human-Centric, and Symbiotic). By including both quantitative and qualitative metrics, the framework seeks to represent HAIC's dynamic and reciprocal nature, enabling the assessment of its impact and success. This framework's practicality can be examined by its application in an array of domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and education, each of which has unique challenges and requirements. Our hope is that this study will facilitate further research on the systematic evaluation of HAIC in real-world applications.
Generative AI for Health Technology Assessment: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policy Considerations
Fleurence, Rachael, Bian, Jiang, Wang, Xiaoyan, Xu, Hua, Dawoud, Dalia, Fakhouri, Tala, Higashi, Mitch, Chhatwal, Jagpreet
This review introduces the transformative potential of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), for health technology assessment (HTA). We explore their applications in four critical areas, evidence synthesis, evidence generation, clinical trials and economic modeling: (1) Evidence synthesis: Generative AI has the potential to assist in automating literature reviews and meta-analyses by proposing search terms, screening abstracts, and extracting data with notable accuracy; (2) Evidence generation: These models can potentially facilitate automating the process and analyze the increasingly available large collections of real-world data (RWD), including unstructured clinical notes and imaging, enhancing the speed and quality of real-world evidence (RWE) generation; (3) Clinical trials: Generative AI can be used to optimize trial design, improve patient matching, and manage trial data more efficiently; and (4) Economic modeling: Generative AI can also aid in the development of health economic models, from conceptualization to validation, thus streamlining the overall HTA process. Despite their promise, these technologies, while rapidly improving, are still nascent and continued careful evaluation in their applications to HTA is required. To ensure their responsible use and implementation, both developers and users of research incorporating these tools, should familiarize themselves with their current limitations, including the issues related to scientific validity, risk of bias, and consider equity and ethical implications. We also surveyed the current policy landscape and provide suggestions for HTA agencies on responsibly integrating generative AI into their workflows, emphasizing the importance of human oversight and the fast-evolving nature of these tools.
Grounding and Evaluation for Large Language Models: Practical Challenges and Lessons Learned (Survey)
Kenthapadi, Krishnaram, Sameki, Mehrnoosh, Taly, Ankur
With the ongoing rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems in high-stakes domains, ensuring the trustworthiness, safety, and observability of these systems has become crucial. It is essential to evaluate and monitor AI systems not only for accuracy and quality-related metrics but also for robustness, bias, security, interpretability, and other responsible AI dimensions. We focus on large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI models, which present additional challenges such as hallucinations, harmful and manipulative content, and copyright infringement. In this survey article accompanying our KDD 2024 tutorial, we highlight a wide range of harms associated with generative AI systems, and survey state of the art approaches (along with open challenges) to address these harms.
Large Language Models can impersonate politicians and other public figures
Herbold, Steffen, Trautsch, Alexander, Kikteva, Zlata, Hautli-Janisz, Annette
Modern AI technology like Large language models (LLMs) has the potential to pollute the public information sphere with made-up content, which poses a significant threat to the cohesion of societies at large. A wide range of research has shown that LLMs are capable of generating text of impressive quality, including persuasive political speech, text with a pre-defined style, and role-specific content. But there is a crucial gap in the literature: We lack large-scale and systematic studies of how capable LLMs are in impersonating political and societal representatives and how the general public judges these impersonations in terms of authenticity, relevance and coherence. We present the results of a study based on a cross-section of British society that shows that LLMs are able to generate responses to debate questions that were part of a broadcast political debate programme in the UK. The impersonated responses are judged to be more authentic and relevant than the original responses given by people who were impersonated. This shows two things: (1) LLMs can be made to contribute meaningfully to the public political debate and (2) there is a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society.
Induction Heads as an Essential Mechanism for Pattern Matching in In-context Learning
As Large language models have shown a remarkable a significant milestone in this area, Elhage et al. ability to learn and perform complex tasks through (2021) demonstrated the existence of induction in-context learning (ICL) (Brown et al., 2020; Touvron heads in Transformer LMs. These heads scan the et al., 2023b). In ICL, the model receives context for previous instances of the current token a demonstration context and a query question as using a prefix matching mechanism, which identifies a prompt for prediction. Unlike supervised learning, if and where a token has appeared before. ICL utilises the pretrained model's capabilities If a matching token is found, the head employs to recognise and replicate patterns within the a copying mechanism to increase the probability demonstration context, thereby enabling accurate of the subsequent token, facilitating exact or approximate predictions for the query without the use of gradient repetition of sequences and embodying updates.