Government
Combine and Conquer: A Meta-Analysis on Data Shift and Out-of-Distribution Detection
Dadalto, Eduardo, Alberge, Florence, Duhamel, Pierre, Piantanida, Pablo
This paper introduces a universal approach to seamlessly combine out-of-distribution (OOD) detection scores. These scores encompass a wide range of techniques that leverage the self-confidence of deep learning models and the anomalous behavior of features in the latent space. Not surprisingly, combining such a varied population using simple statistics proves inadequate. To overcome this challenge, we propose a quantile normalization to map these scores into p-values, effectively framing the problem into a multi-variate hypothesis test. Then, we combine these tests using established meta-analysis tools, resulting in a more effective detector with consolidated decision boundaries. Furthermore, we create a probabilistic interpretable criterion by mapping the final statistics into a distribution with known parameters. Through empirical investigation, we explore different types of shifts, each exerting varying degrees of impact on data. Our results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves overall robustness and performance across diverse OOD detection scenarios. Notably, our framework is easily extensible for future developments in detection scores and stands as the first to combine decision boundaries in this context. The code and artifacts associated with this work are publicly available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/edadaltocg/detectors}}.
Former Obama fundraiser says she's divorcing the Democratic Party, voting for Trump for the first time
Former Obama-Biden fundraiser Allison Huynh joins'Jesse Watters Primetime' to discuss her'divorce' from the Democratic Party and why she is auctioning off her million-dollar Obama'Hope' poster. An ex-Obama fundraiser who helped raise millions in donations for his campaign announced that she is "divorcing" the Democratic Party and plans to vote for Trump in the upcoming election. "Like any divorce, there's not just one thing, there's a series of things that led up to it," Allison Huynh said on "Jesse Watters Primetime" Wednesday. Huynh, who created Willow Garage, a company that created robotics and AI systems which were later sold to Google, along with her then-husband Google programmer Scott Hassan, helped raise millions of dollars for the Obama campaign in 2008 by hosting elaborate " 50,000- and 100,000-per-plate dinners," for Silicon Valley giants, the New York Post reported. Allison Huynh attends FORMS Opening Reception Presented by Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch at Miami Design District on December 5, 2023, in Miami, Florida.
New discoveries about 'sophisticated' Native American tribe that mysteriously vanished nearly 600 years ago unearthed in Illinois
A sprawling Native American city stretching six square-miles and home to roughly 20,000 people disappeared from the Mississippi river valley over 600 years ago. And while the'Cahokia' tribe mysteriously vanished, archaeologists have uncovered artifacts from the society that could provide clues about the group - their culture, language, and even their downfall are still lost to history. The team university researchers recently discovered pottery, tools, like'micro-drills,' and wall trenches at the Illinois site, dating back approximately 900 years. Wood particles were also analyzed at the site as experts hypothesize the people cut down forests, which degraded the oil and may have caused flooding - an event that could have led to the tribe abandoning the city. The team university researchers recently discovered pottery (pictured), tools, like'micro-drills,' and wall trenches at the Illinois site, dating back approximately 900 years The excavation is being conducted by students from Saint Louis University (SLU) and neighboring colleges, who are working toward a career in archaeology.
Regulating AI Adaptation: An Analysis of AI Medical Device Updates
Wu, Kevin, Wu, Eric, Rodolfa, Kit, Ho, Daniel E., Zou, James
While the pace of development of AI has rapidly progressed in recent years, the implementation of safe and effective regulatory frameworks has lagged behind. In particular, the adaptive nature of AI models presents unique challenges to regulators as updating a model can improve its performance but also introduce safety risks. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been a forerunner in regulating and approving hundreds of AI medical devices. To better understand how AI is updated and its regulatory considerations, we systematically analyze the frequency and nature of updates in FDA-approved AI medical devices. We find that less than 2% of all devices report having been updated by being re-trained on new data. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of devices report updates in the form of new functionality and marketing claims. As an illustrative case study, we analyze pneumothorax detection models and find that while model performance can degrade by as much as 0.18 AUC when evaluated on new sites, re-training on site-specific data can mitigate this performance drop, recovering up to 0.23 AUC. However, we also observed significant degradation on the original site after re-training using data from new sites, providing insight from one example that challenges the current one-model-fits-all approach to regulatory approvals. Our analysis provides an in-depth look at the current state of FDA-approved AI device updates and insights for future regulatory policies toward model updating and adaptive AI.
Human-AI Safety: A Descendant of Generative AI and Control Systems Safety
Bajcsy, Andrea, Fisac, Jaime F.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is interacting with people at an unprecedented scale, offering new avenues for immense positive impact, but also raising widespread concerns around the potential for individual and societal harm. Today, the predominant paradigm for human--AI safety focuses on fine-tuning the generative model's outputs to better agree with human-provided examples or feedback. In reality, however, the consequences of an AI model's outputs cannot be determined in isolation: they are tightly entangled with the responses and behavior of human users over time. In this paper, we distill key complementary lessons from AI safety and control systems safety, highlighting open challenges as well as key synergies between both fields. We then argue that meaningful safety assurances for advanced AI technologies require reasoning about how the feedback loop formed by AI outputs and human behavior may drive the interaction towards different outcomes. To this end, we introduce a unifying formalism to capture dynamic, safety-critical human--AI interactions and propose a concrete technical roadmap towards next-generation human-centered AI safety.
Teaching LLMs to Abstain across Languages via Multilingual Feedback
Feng, Shangbin, Shi, Weijia, Wang, Yike, Ding, Wenxuan, Ahia, Orevaoghene, Li, Shuyue Stella, Balachandran, Vidhisha, Sitaram, Sunayana, Tsvetkov, Yulia
Multilingual LLMs often have knowledge disparities across languages, with larger gaps in under-resourced languages. Teaching LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps is thus a promising strategy to mitigate hallucinations in multilingual settings. However, previous studies on LLM abstention primarily focus on English; we find that directly applying existing solutions beyond English results in up to 20.5% performance gaps between high and low-resource languages, potentially due to LLMs' drop in calibration and reasoning beyond a few resource-rich languages. To this end, we propose strategies to enhance LLM abstention by learning from multilingual feedback, where LLMs self-reflect on proposed answers in one language by generating multiple feedback items in related languages: we show that this helps identifying the knowledge gaps across diverse languages, cultures, and communities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our multilingual feedback approach outperforms various strong baselines, achieving up to 9.2% improvement for low-resource languages across three black-box and open models on three datasets, featuring open-book, closed-book, and commonsense QA. Further analysis reveals that multilingual feedback is both an effective and a more equitable abstain strategy to serve diverse language speakers, and cultural factors have great impact on language selection and LLM abstention behavior, highlighting future directions for multilingual and multi-cultural reliable language modeling.
Enhancing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution by Discourse Structure and Semantic Information
Gao, Qiang, Li, Bobo, Meng, Zixiang, Li, Yunlong, Zhou, Jun, Li, Fei, Teng, Chong, Ji, Donghong
Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models, which either compute mention similarity directly or enhance mention representation by extracting event arguments (such as location, time, agent, and patient), lacking the ability to utilize document-level information. As a result, they struggle to capture long-distance dependencies. This shortcoming leads to their underwhelming performance in determining coreference for the events where their argument information relies on long-distance dependencies. In light of these limitations, we propose the construction of document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model the structural and semantic information of documents. Subsequently, cross-document heterogeneous graphs are constructed and GAT is utilized to learn the representations of events. Finally, a pair scorer calculates the similarity between each pair of events and co-referred events can be recognized using standard clustering algorithm. Additionally, as the existing cross-document event coreference datasets are limited to English, we have developed a large-scale Chinese cross-document event coreference dataset to fill this gap, which comprises 53,066 event mentions and 4,476 clusters. After applying our model on the English and Chinese datasets respectively, it outperforms all baselines by large margins.
Serial Position Effects of Large Language Models
Guo, Xiaobo, Vosoughi, Soroush
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in zero-shot learning applications, generating responses to queries using only pre-training information without the need for additional fine-tuning. This represents a significant departure from traditional machine learning approaches. Previous research has indicated that LLMs may exhibit serial position effects, such as primacy and recency biases, which are well-documented cognitive biases in human psychology. Our extensive testing across various tasks and models confirms the widespread occurrence of these effects, although their intensity varies. We also discovered that while carefully designed prompts can somewhat mitigate these biases, their effectiveness is inconsistent. These findings underscore the significance of serial position effects during the inference process, particularly in scenarios where there are no ground truth labels, highlighting the need for greater focus on addressing these effects in LLM applications.
CaT-BENCH: Benchmarking Language Model Understanding of Causal and Temporal Dependencies in Plans
Lal, Yash Kumar, Cohen, Vanya, Chambers, Nathanael, Balasubramanian, Niranjan, Mooney, Raymond
Understanding the abilities of LLMs to reason about natural language plans, such as instructional text and recipes, is critical to reliably using them in decision-making systems. A fundamental aspect of plans is the temporal order in which their steps needs to be executed, which reflects the underlying causal dependencies between them. We introduce CaT-Bench, a benchmark of Step Order Prediction questions, which test whether a step must necessarily occur before or after another in cooking recipe plans. We use this to evaluate how well frontier LLMs understand causal and temporal dependencies. We find that SOTA LLMs are underwhelming (best zero-shot is only 0.59 in F1), and are biased towards predicting dependence more often, perhaps relying on temporal order of steps as a heuristic. While prompting for explanations and using few-shot examples improve performance, the best F1 result is only 0.73. Further, human evaluation of explanations along with answer correctness show that, on average, humans do not agree with model reasoning. Surprisingly, we also find that explaining after answering leads to better performance than normal chain-of-thought prompting, and LLM answers are not consistent across questions about the same step pairs. Overall, results show that LLMs' ability to detect dependence between steps has significant room for improvement.
LaMSUM: A Novel Framework for Extractive Summarization of User Generated Content using LLMs
Chhikara, Garima, Sharma, Anurag, Gurucharan, V., Ghosh, Kripabandhu, Chakraborty, Abhijnan
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, including summarization. Inherently LLMs produce abstractive summaries, and the task of achieving extractive summaries through LLMs still remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose a novel framework LaMSUM to generate extractive summaries through LLMs for large user-generated text by leveraging voting algorithms. Our evaluation on three popular open-source LLMs (Llama 3, Mixtral and Gemini) reveal that the LaMSUM outperforms state-of-the-art extractive summarization methods. We further attempt to provide the rationale behind the output summary produced by LLMs. Overall, this is one of the early attempts to achieve extractive summarization for large user-generated text by utilizing LLMs, and likely to generate further interest in the community.