Is AI set to redefine the legal profession? We argue that this claim is not supported by the current evidence. We dive into AI's increasingly prevalent roles in three types of legal tasks: information processing; tasks involving creativity, reasoning, or judgment; and predictions about the future. We find that the ease of evaluating legal applications varies greatly across legal tasks, based on the ease of identifying correct answers and the observability of information relevant to the task at hand. Tasks that would lead to the most significant changes to the legal profession are also the ones most prone to overoptimism about AI capabilities, as they are harder to evaluate. We make recommendations for better evaluation and deployment of AI in legal contexts.

In recent times, there has been an increasing awareness about imminent environmental challenges, resulting in people showing a stronger dedication to taking care of the environment and nurturing green life. The current $19.6 billion indoor gardening industry, reflective of this growing sentiment, not only signifies a monetary value but also speaks of a profound human desire to reconnect with the natural world. However, several recent surveys cast a revealing light on the fate of plants within our care, with more than half succumbing primarily due to the silent menace of improper care. Thus, the need for accessible expertise capable of assisting and guiding individuals through the intricacies of plant care has become paramount more than ever. In this work, we make the very first attempt at building a plant care assistant, which aims to assist people with plant(-ing) concerns through conversations. We propose a plant care conversational dataset named Plantational, which contains around 1K dialogues between users and plant care experts. Our end-to-end proposed approach is two-fold : (i) We first benchmark the dataset with the help of various large language models (LLMs) and visual language model (VLM) by studying the impact of instruction tuning (zero-shot and few-shot prompting) and fine-tuning techniques on this task; (ii) finally, we build EcoSage, a multi-modal plant care assisting dialogue generation framework, incorporating an adapter-based modality infusion using a gated mechanism. We performed an extensive examination (both automated and manual evaluation) of the performance exhibited by various LLMs and VLM in the generation of the domain-specific dialogue responses to underscore the respective strengths and weaknesses of these diverse models.

Since the launch of applications such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, generative artificial intelligence has been controversial as a tool for creating artwork. While some have presented longtermist worries about these technologies as harbingers of fully automated futures to come, more pressing is the impact of generative AI on creative labour in the present. Already, business leaders have begun replacing human artistic labour with AI-generated images. In response, the artistic community has launched a protest movement, which argues that AI image generation is a kind of theft. This paper analyzes, substantiates, and critiques these arguments, concluding that AI image generators involve an unethical kind of labour theft. If correct, many other AI applications also rely upon theft.

Cherry-picking refers to the deliberate selection of evidence or facts that favor a particular viewpoint while ignoring or distorting evidence that supports an opposing perspective. Manually identifying instances of cherry-picked statements in news stories can be challenging, particularly when the opposing viewpoint's story is absent. This study introduces Cherry, an innovative approach for automatically detecting cherry-picked statements in news articles by finding missing important statements in the target news story. Cherry utilizes the analysis of news coverage from multiple sources to identify instances of cherry-picking. Our approach relies on language models that consider contextual information from other news sources to classify statements based on their importance to the event covered in the target news story. Furthermore, this research introduces a novel dataset specifically designed for cherry-picking detection, which was used to train and evaluate the performance of the models. Our best performing model achieves an F-1 score of about %89 in detecting important statements when tested on unseen set of news stories. Moreover, results show the importance incorporating external knowledge from alternative unbiased narratives when assessing a statement's importance.

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous throughout natural and social sciences, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been shown to be effective at solving prediction and inference problems on graph data. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate that GNNs can be applied to solve Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems. CO concerns optimizing a function over a discrete solution space that is often intractably large. To learn to solve CO problems, we formulate the optimization process as a sequential decision making problem, where the return is related to how close the candidate solution is to optimality. We use a GNN to learn a policy to iteratively build increasingly promising candidate solutions. We present preliminary evidence that GNNs trained through Q-Learning can solve CO problems with performance approaching state-of-the-art heuristic-based solvers, using only a fraction of the parameters and training time.

Is transparency always beneficial in complex systems such as traffic networks and stock markets? How is transparency defined in multi-agent systems, and what is its optimal degree at which social welfare is highest? We take an agent-based view to define transparency (or its lacking) as delay in agent observability of environment states, and utilize simulations to analyze the impact of delay on social welfare. To model the adaptation of agent strategies with varying delays, we model agents as learners maximizing the same objectives under different delays in a simulated environment. Focusing on two agent types - constrained and unconstrained, we use multi-agent reinforcement learning to evaluate the impact of delay on agent outcomes and social welfare. Empirical demonstration of our framework in simulated financial markets shows opposing trends in outcomes of the constrained and unconstrained agents with delay, with an optimal partial transparency regime at which social welfare is maximal.

The argument sufficiency assessment task aims to determine if the premises of a given argument support its conclusion. To tackle this task, existing works often train a classifier on data annotated by humans. However, annotating data is laborious, and annotations are often inconsistent due to subjective criteria. Motivated by the probability of sufficiency (PS) definition in the causal literature, we propose CASA, a zero-shot causality-driven argument sufficiency assessment framework. PS measures how likely introducing the premise event would lead to the conclusion, when both the premise and conclusion events are absent. To estimate this probability, we propose to use large language models (LLMs) to generate contexts that are inconsistent with the premise and conclusion, and revise them by injecting the premise event. Experiments on two logical fallacy detection datasets demonstrate that CASA accurately identifies insufficient arguments. We further deploy CASA in a writing assistance application, and find that suggestions generated by CASA enhance the sufficiency of student-written arguments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xxxiaol/CASA.

Inspired by the increasing interest in leveraging large language models for translation, this paper evaluates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT in comparison to the mainstream neural machine translation (NMT) engines in translating Chinese diplomatic texts into English. Specifically, we examine the translation quality of ChatGPT and NMT engines as measured by four automated metrics and human evaluation based on an error-typology and six analytic rubrics. Our findings show that automated metrics yield similar results for ChatGPT under different prompts and NMT systems, while human annotators tend to assign noticeably higher scores to ChatGPT when it is provided an example or contextual information about the translation task. Pairwise correlation between automated metrics and dimensions of human evaluation produces weak and non-significant results, suggesting the divergence between the two methods of translation quality assessment. These findings provide valuable insights into the potential of ChatGPT as a capable machine translator, and the influence of prompt engineering on its performance.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of a Machine Learning (ML) model across multiple parties, facilitating the preservation of users' and institutions' privacy by keeping data stored locally. Instead of centralizing raw data, FL exchanges locally refined model parameters to build a global model incrementally. While FL is more compliant with emerging regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring the right to be forgotten in this context - allowing FL participants to remove their data contributions from the learned model - remains unclear. In addition, it is recognized that malicious clients may inject backdoors into the global model through updates, e.g. to generate mispredictions on specially crafted data examples. Consequently, there is the need for mechanisms that can guarantee individuals the possibility to remove their data and erase malicious contributions even after aggregation, without compromising the already acquired "good" knowledge. This highlights the necessity for novel Federated Unlearning (FU) algorithms, which can efficiently remove specific clients' contributions without full model retraining. This survey provides background concepts, empirical evidence, and practical guidelines to design/implement efficient FU schemes. Our study includes a detailed analysis of the metrics for evaluating unlearning in FL and presents an in-depth literature review categorizing state-of-the-art FU contributions under a novel taxonomy. Finally, we outline the most relevant and still open technical challenges, by identifying the most promising research directions in the field.

Machine translation often suffers from biased data and algorithms that can lead to unacceptable errors in system output. While bias in gender norms has been investigated, less is known about whether MT systems encode bias about social relationships, e.g. sentences such as "the lawyer kissed her wife." We investigate the degree of bias against same-gender relationships in MT systems, using generated template sentences drawn from several noun-gender languages (e.g. Spanish). We find that three popular MT services consistently fail to accurately translate sentences concerning relationships between nouns of the same gender. The error rate varies considerably based on the context, e.g. same-gender sentences referencing high female-representation occupations are translated with lower accuracy. We provide this work as a case study in the evaluation of intrinsic bias in NLP systems, with respect to social relationships.