Government
Return of EM: Entity-driven Answer Set Expansion for QA Evaluation
Lee, Dongryeol, Lee, Minwoo, Min, Kyungmin, Park, Joonsuk, Jung, Kyomin
Recently, directly using large language models (LLMs) has been shown to be the most reliable method to evaluate QA models. However, it suffers from limited interpretability, high cost, and environmental harm. To address these, we propose to use soft exact match (EM) with entitydriven answer set expansion. Our approach expands the gold answer set to include diverse surface forms, based on the observation that the surface forms often follow particular patterns depending on the entity type. The experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional evaluation methods by a large margin. Moreover, the reliability of our evaluation method is comparable to that of LLM-based ones, while offering the benefits of high interpretability and reduced environmental harm.
Fairness-Aware Meta-Learning via Nash Bargaining
Zeng, Yi, Yang, Xuelin, Chen, Li, Ferrer, Cristian Canton, Jin, Ming, Jordan, Michael I., Jia, Ruoxi
The traditional formulation of machine learning is in terms of a system that improves its predictive and decision-making performance by interacting with an environment. Such a formulation is overly narrow in emerging applications--it lumps the social context of a learning system into the undifferentiated concept of an "environment" and provides no special consideration of the collective nature of learning. Such social context includes notions of scarcity and conflict, as well as goals such as social norms and collaborative work that are best formulated at the level of social collectives. The neglect of such considerations in traditional machine learning leads to undesirable outcomes in real-world deployments of machine learning systems, including outcomes that favor particular groups of people over others [44, 7, 31, 10, 38, 51], the amplification of social biases and stereotypes [28, 14, 47], and an ongoing lack of clarity regarding issues of communication, trust, and fairness. Our focus is the current paper is fairness, and we take a perspective on fairness that blends learning methodology with economic mechanisms. The current favored methodology for addressing fairness recognizes that it is not a one-size-fits-all concept--different fairness notions are appropriate for different social settings [49, 32, 50]--and treats fairness via meta-learning ideas. Meta-learning is implemented algorithmically with the tools of bi-level optimization. Specifically, fairness-aware metalearning employs outer optimization to align with a specific fairness goal over a small, demographically balanced validation set to adjust a set of hyperparameters, while the inner optimization minimizes the hyperparameter-adjusted training loss [43, 52, 53].
A benchmark dataset for deep learning-based airplane detection: HRPlanes
Airplane detection from satellite imagery is a challenging task due to the complex backgrounds in the images and differences in data acquisition conditions caused by the sensor geometry and atmospheric effects. Deep learning methods provide reliable and accurate solutions for automatic detection of airplanes; however, huge amount of training data is required to obtain promising results. In this study, we create a novel airplane detection dataset called High Resolution Planes (HRPlanes) by using images from Google Earth (GE) and labeling the bounding box of each plane on the images. HRPlanes include GE images of several different airports across the world to represent a variety of landscape, seasonal and satellite geometry conditions obtained from different satellites. We evaluated our dataset with two widely used object detection methods namely YOLOv4 and Faster R-CNN. Our preliminary results show that the proposed dataset can be a valuable data source and benchmark data set for future applications. Moreover, proposed architectures and results of this study could be used for transfer learning of different datasets and models for airplane detection.
WEIRD ICWSM: How Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic is Social Computing Research?
Septiandri, Ali Akbar, Constantinides, Marios, Quercia, Daniele
Much of the research in social computing analyzes data from social media platforms, which may inherently carry biases. An overlooked source of such bias is the over-representation of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations, which might not accurately mirror the global demographic diversity. We evaluated the dependence on WEIRD populations in research presented at the AAAI ICWSM conference; the only venue whose proceedings are fully dedicated to social computing research. We did so by analyzing 494 papers published from 2018 to 2022, which included full research papers, dataset papers and posters. After filtering out papers that analyze synthetic datasets or those lacking clear country of origin, we were left with 420 papers from which 188 participants in a crowdsourcing study with full manual validation extracted data for the WEIRD scores computation. This data was then used to adapt existing WEIRD metrics to be applicable for social media data. We found that 37% of these papers focused solely on data from Western countries. This percentage is significantly less than the percentages observed in research from CHI (76%) and FAccT (84%) conferences, suggesting a greater diversity of dataset origins within ICWSM. However, the studies at ICWSM still predominantly examine populations from countries that are more Educated, Industrialized, and Rich in comparison to those in FAccT, with a special note on the 'Democratic' variable reflecting political freedoms and rights. This points out the utility of social media data in shedding light on findings from countries with restricted political freedoms. Based on these insights, we recommend extensions of current "paper checklists" to include considerations about the WEIRD bias and call for the community to broaden research inclusivity by encouraging the use of diverse datasets from underrepresented regions.
Benchmarking Trustworthiness of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Study
Zhang, Yichi, Huang, Yao, Sun, Yitong, Liu, Chang, Zhao, Zhe, Fang, Zhengwei, Wang, Yifan, Chen, Huanran, Yang, Xiao, Wei, Xingxing, Su, Hang, Dong, Yinpeng, Zhu, Jun
Despite the superior capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, they still face significant trustworthiness challenges. Yet, current literature on the assessment of trustworthy MLLMs remains limited, lacking a holistic evaluation to offer thorough insights into future improvements. In this work, we establish MultiTrust, the first comprehensive and unified benchmark on the trustworthiness of MLLMs across five primary aspects: truthfulness, safety, robustness, fairness, and privacy. Our benchmark employs a rigorous evaluation strategy that addresses both multimodal risks and cross-modal impacts, encompassing 32 diverse tasks with self-curated datasets. Extensive experiments with 21 modern MLLMs reveal some previously unexplored trustworthiness issues and risks, highlighting the complexities introduced by the multimodality and underscoring the necessity for advanced methodologies to enhance their reliability. For instance, typical proprietary models still struggle with the perception of visually confusing images and are vulnerable to multimodal jailbreaking and adversarial attacks; MLLMs are more inclined to disclose privacy in text and reveal ideological and cultural biases even when paired with irrelevant images in inference, indicating that the multimodality amplifies the internal risks from base LLMs. Additionally, we release a scalable toolbox for standardized trustworthiness research, aiming to facilitate future advancements in this important field. Code and resources are publicly available at: https://multi-trust.github.io/.
Evolutionary Computation and Explainable AI: A Roadmap to Transparent Intelligent Systems
Zhou, Ryan, Bacardit, Jaume, Brownlee, Alexander, Cagnoni, Stefano, Fyvie, Martin, Iacca, Giovanni, McCall, John, van Stein, Niki, Walker, David, Hu, Ting
AI methods are finding an increasing number of applications, but their often black-box nature has raised concerns about accountability and trust. The field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has emerged in response to the need for human understanding of AI models. Evolutionary computation (EC), as a family of powerful optimization and learning tools, has significant potential to contribute to XAI. In this paper, we provide an introduction to XAI and review various techniques in current use for explaining machine learning (ML) models. We then focus on how EC can be used in XAI, and review some XAI approaches which incorporate EC techniques. Additionally, we discuss the application of XAI principles within EC itself, examining how these principles can shed some light on the behavior and outcomes of EC algorithms in general, on the (automatic) configuration of these algorithms, and on the underlying problem landscapes that these algorithms optimize. Finally, we discuss some open challenges in XAI and opportunities for future research in this field using EC. Our aim is to demonstrate that EC is well-suited for addressing current problems in explainability and to encourage further exploration of these methods to contribute to the development of more transparent and trustworthy ML models and EC algorithms.
Deception Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
History, Economics, Politics, Philosophy, Communication Sciences, Sociology, and the Cognitive Sciences have looked at deception from perspectives that are predominantly anthropocentric. Thus, the significant knowledge we have about deception revolves around its human nature. This acquired knowledge emphasises that deception plays an important role for humans and that deception is a multi-layered phenomenon which takes numerous forms during social interactions. However, more recently, the anthropocentric grip on understanding deception has weakened. Research on deception (and its detection) is expanding beyond human agents, to deceptive technologies, due to the current hybridisation of our societies. Hybrid societies are'self-organizing, collective systems, which are composed of different components, for example, natural and artificial parts (bio-hybrid) or human beings interacting with and through technical systems (socio-technical)' [Hamann et al., 2016]. Nowadays, AI technologies play a crucial role in hybrid societies, but research in AI and deception has not progressed enough to allow us to understand and predict how advancements in the design of AI agents will impact hybrid societies. A particular threat to the hybridisation of societies is the development of fully autonomous deceptive AI agents that will be able to form their own reasons and methods to perform deception, as well as out-think and outsmart humans and other AI agents [Sarkadi, 2021]. By fully autonomous deceptive AI agent we mean neither the already existing human-scripted'mindless' chatterbots which follow a pre-programmed script to deceive [Mauldin, 1994], nor the'clueless' stochastic parrots [Bender et al., 2021] which blurt out sentences without having any sense of their meaning in-context, but AI agents in the likes of the conceptual machines that trick the judges in the Imitation Game [Turing, 1950].
Towards Generalized Hydrological Forecasting using Transformer Models for 120-Hour Streamflow Prediction
Demiray, Bekir Z., Demir, Ibrahim
This study explores the efficacy of a Transformer model for 120-hour streamflow prediction across 125 diverse locations in Iowa, US. Utilizing data from the preceding 72 hours, including precipitation, evapotranspiration, and discharge values, we developed a generalized model to predict future streamflow. Our approach contrasts with traditional methods that typically rely on location-specific models. We benchmarked the Transformer model's performance against three deep learning models (LSTM, GRU, and Seq2Seq) and the Persistence approach, employing Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE), Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE), Pearson's r, and Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) as metrics. The study reveals the Transformer model's superior performance, maintaining higher median NSE and KGE scores and exhibiting the lowest NRMSE values. This indicates its capability to accurately simulate and predict streamflow, adapting effectively to varying hydrological conditions and geographical variances. Our findings underscore the Transformer model's potential as an advanced tool in hydrological modeling, offering significant improvements over traditional and contemporary approaches.
Estimating the Hallucination Rate of Generative AI
Jesson, Andrew, Beltran-Velez, Nicolas, Chu, Quentin, Karlekar, Sweta, Kossen, Jannik, Gal, Yarin, Cunningham, John P., Blei, David
This work is about estimating the hallucination rate for in-context learning (ICL) with Generative AI. In ICL, a conditional generative model (CGM) is prompted with a dataset and asked to make a prediction based on that dataset. The Bayesian interpretation of ICL assumes that the CGM is calculating a posterior predictive distribution over an unknown Bayesian model of a latent parameter and data. With this perspective, we define a \textit{hallucination} as a generated prediction that has low-probability under the true latent parameter. We develop a new method that takes an ICL problem -- that is, a CGM, a dataset, and a prediction question -- and estimates the probability that a CGM will generate a hallucination. Our method only requires generating queries and responses from the model and evaluating its response log probability. We empirically evaluate our method on synthetic regression and natural language ICL tasks using large language models.
The Download: AI propaganda, and digital twins
Renée DiResta is the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new "first" in its corporate history. It wasn't an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists--including players from Russia, China, Iran, and Israel--using their generative AI tools for deceptive tactics that ranged from creating large volumes of social media comments in multiple languages to turning news articles into Facebook posts. The use of these tools, OpenAI noted, seemed intended to improve the quality and quantity of output.