There has been considerable recent interest in scoring properties on the basis of eviction risk. The success of methods for eviction prediction is typically evaluated using different measures of predictive accuracy. However, the underlying goal of such prediction is to direct appropriate assistance to households that may be at greater risk so they remain stably housed. Thus, we must ask the question of how useful such predictions are in targeting outreach efforts - informing action. In this paper, we investigate this question using a novel dataset that matches information on properties, evictions, and owners. We perform an eviction prediction task to produce risk scores and then use these risk scores to plan targeted outreach policies. We show that the risk scores are, in fact, useful, enabling a theoretical team of caseworkers to reach more eviction-prone properties in the same amount of time, compared to outreach policies that are either neighborhood-based or focus on buildings with a recent history of evictions. We also discuss the importance of neighborhood and ownership features in both risk prediction and targeted outreach.

A stable, reliable, and controllable orbit lock system is crucial to an electron (or ion) accelerator because the beam orbit and beam energy instability strongly affect the quality of the beam delivered to experimental halls. Currently, when the orbit lock system fails operators must manually intervene. This paper develops a Machine Learning based fault detection methodology to identify orbit lock anomalies and notify accelerator operations staff of the off-normal behavior. Our method is unsupervised, so it does not require labeled data. It uses Long-Short Memory Networks (LSTM) Auto Encoder to capture normal patterns and predict future values of monitoring sensors in the orbit lock system. Anomalies are detected when the prediction error exceeds a threshold. We conducted experiments using monitoring data from Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). The results are promising: the percentage of real anomalies identified by our solution is 68.6%-89.3% using monitoring data of a single component in the orbit lock control system. The accuracy can be as high as 82%.

This paper investigates the potential benefits of language-specific fact-checking models, focusing on the case of Chinese. We demonstrate the limitations of methods such as translating Chinese claims and evidence into English or directly using multilingual large language models (e.g. GPT4), highlighting the need for language-specific systems. We further develop a state-of-the-art Chinese fact-checking system that, in contrast to previous approaches which treat evidence selection as a pairwise sentence classification task, considers the context of sentences. We also create an adversarial dataset to identify biases in our model, and while they are present as in English language datasets and models, they are often specific to the Chinese culture. Our study emphasizes the importance of language-specific fact-checking models to effectively combat misinformation.

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology's transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show how AI could pose catastrophic risks. The first argument -- the Problem of Power-Seeking -- claims that, under certain assumptions, advanced AI systems are likely to engage in dangerous power-seeking behavior in pursuit of their goals. We review reasons for thinking that AI systems might seek power, that they might obtain it, that this could lead to catastrophe, and that we might build and deploy such systems anyway. The second argument claims that the development of human-level AI will unlock rapid further progress, culminating in AI systems far more capable than any human -- this is the Singularity Hypothesis. Power-seeking behavior on the part of such systems might be particularly dangerous. We discuss a variety of objections to both arguments and conclude by assessing the state of the debate.

Recent decisions to discontinue access to social media APIs are having detrimental effects on Internet research and the field of computational social science as a whole. This lack of access to data has been dubbed the Post-API era of Internet research. Fortunately, popular search engines have the means to crawl, capture, and surface social media data on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) if provided the proper search query, and may provide a solution to this dilemma. In the present work we ask: does SERP provide a complete and unbiased sample of social media data? Is SERP a viable alternative to direct API-access? To answer these questions, we perform a comparative analysis between (Google) SERP results and nonsampled data from Reddit and Twitter/X. We find that SERP results are highly biased in favor of popular posts; against political, pornographic, and vulgar posts; are more positive in their sentiment; and have large topical gaps. Overall, we conclude that SERP is not a viable alternative to social media API access.

While large language models (LLMs) are extremely capable at text generation, their outputs are still distinguishable from human-authored text. We explore this separation across many metrics over text, many sampling techniques, many types of text data, and across two popular LLMs, LLaMA and Vicuna. Along the way, we introduce a new metric, recoverability, to highlight differences between human and machine text; and we propose a new sampling technique, burst sampling, designed to close this gap. We find that LLaMA and Vicuna have distinct distributions under many of the metrics, and that this influences our results: Recoverability separates real from fake text better than any other metric when using LLaMA. When using Vicuna, burst sampling produces text which is distributionally closer to real text compared to other sampling techniques.

In this work, we introduce and analyze an approach to knowledge transfer from one collection of facts to another without the need for entity or relation matching. The method works for both canonicalized knowledge bases and uncanonicalized or open knowledge bases, i.e., knowledge bases where more than one copy of a real-world entity or relation may exist. The main contribution is a method that can make use of large-scale pre-training on facts, which were collected from unstructured text, to improve predictions on structured data from a specific domain. The introduced method is most impactful on small datasets such as ReVerb20k, where a 6% absolute increase of mean reciprocal rank and 65% relative decrease of mean rank over the previously best method was achieved, despite not relying on large pre-trained models like Bert. To understand the obtained pre-trained models better, we then introduce a novel dataset for the analysis of pre-trained models for Open Knowledge Base Completion, called Doge (Diagnostics of Open knowledge Graph Embeddings). It consists of 6 subsets and is designed to measure multiple properties of a pre-trained model: robustness against synonyms, ability to perform deductive reasoning, presence of gender stereotypes, consistency with reverse relations, and coverage of different areas of general knowledge. Using the introduced dataset, we show that the existing OKBC models lack consistency in the presence of synonyms and inverse relations and are unable to perform deductive reasoning. Moreover, their predictions often align with gender stereotypes, which persist even when presented with counterevidence. We additionally investigate the role of pre-trained word embeddings and demonstrate that avoiding biased word embeddings is not a sufficient measure to prevent biased behavior of OKBC models.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) augments large language models (LLM) by retrieving relevant knowledge, showing promising potential in mitigating LLM hallucinations and enhancing response quality, thereby facilitating the great adoption of LLMs in practice. However, we find that existing RAG systems are inadequate in answering multi-hop queries, which require retrieving and reasoning over multiple pieces of supporting evidence. Furthermore, to our knowledge, no existing RAG benchmarking dataset focuses on multi-hop queries. In this paper, we develop a novel dataset, MultiHop-RAG, which consists of a knowledge base, a large collection of multi-hop queries, their ground-truth answers, and the associated supporting evidence. We detail the procedure of building the dataset, utilizing an English news article dataset as the underlying RAG knowledge base. We demonstrate the benchmarking utility of MultiHop-RAG in two experiments. The first experiment compares different embedding models for retrieving evidence for multi-hop queries. In the second experiment, we examine the capabilities of various state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4, PaLM, and Llama2-70B, in reasoning and answering multi-hop queries given the evidence. Both experiments reveal that existing RAG methods perform unsatisfactorily in retrieving and answering multi-hop queries. We hope MultiHop-RAG will be a valuable resource for the community in developing effective RAG systems, thereby facilitating greater adoption of LLMs in practice. The MultiHop-RAG and implemented RAG system is publicly available at https://github.com/yixuantt/MultiHop-RAG/.

This chapter focuses on gender-related errors in machine translation (MT) in the context of low-resource languages. We begin by explaining what low-resource languages are, examining the inseparable social and computational factors that create such linguistic hierarchies. We demonstrate through a case study of our mother tongue Bengali, a global language spoken by almost 300 million people but still classified as low-resource, how gender is assumed and inferred in translations to and from the high(est)-resource English when no such information is provided in source texts. We discuss the postcolonial and societal impacts of such errors leading to linguistic erasure and representational harms, and conclude by discussing potential solutions towards uplifting languages by providing them more agency in MT conversations.

We study the problem of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) on private datasets. This scenario poses privacy risks, as LLMs may leak or regurgitate the private examples demonstrated in the prompt. We propose a novel algorithm that generates synthetic few-shot demonstrations from the private dataset with formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees, and show empirically that it can achieve effective ICL. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and compare our algorithm with non-private ICL and zero-shot solutions. Our results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve competitive performance with strong privacy levels. The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs), popularized by the seminal work of Brown et al. (2020), has revolutionized the field of natural language processing and machine learning; see Dong et al. (2023) for a survey on ICL and the references therein. In-context learning involves downstream task adaptation without modifying a pre-trained model's weights. This is achieved by conditioning the model through a series of demonstrations of the task at hand appended as a prompt. An advantage of ICL is that it offers a cost-effective and adaptable alternative to finetuning LLMs. By leveraging the model's pre-trained knowledge, it enables efficient generalization across tasks, allows for quick adaptation to new domains or concepts, and requires only a handful of labeled examples for adaptation. However, privacy is a concern when deploying LLMs with users' data incorporated into prompts. As an example, consider healthcare AI applications, where clinical reports belonging to the patients may be used as demonstrations to provide relevant context to the LLM to answer queries. A malicious adversary might attempt to circumvent API restrictions through jailbreaking thereby gaining direct access to the demonstrations as depicted in Figure 1. More generally, it is a major concern that LLMs may regurgitate prompt data in their output (Priyanshu et al., 2023; Duan et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023). These scenarios raise privacy risks regarding the data used for constructing the prompt.