Item Response Theory (IRT) has been widely used in educational psychometrics to assess student ability, as well as the difficulty and discrimination of test questions. In this context, discrimination specifically refers to how effectively a question distinguishes between students of different ability levels, and it does not carry any connotation related to fairness. In recent years, IRT has been successfully used to evaluate the predictive performance of Machine Learning (ML) models, but this paper marks its first application in fairness evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel Fair-IRT framework to evaluate a set of predictive models on a set of individuals, while simultaneously eliciting specific parameters, namely, the ability to make fair predictions (a feature of predictive models), as well as the discrimination and difficulty of individuals that affect the prediction results. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments to comprehensively understand the implications of these parameters for fairness evaluation. Detailed explanations for item characteristic curves (ICCs) are provided for particular individuals. We propose the flatness of ICCs to disentangle the unfairness between individuals and predictive models. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework as a fairness evaluation tool. Two real-world case studies illustrate its potential application in evaluating fairness in both classification and regression tasks. Our paper aligns well with the Responsible Web track by proposing a Fair-IRT framework to evaluate fairness in ML models, which directly contributes to the development of a more inclusive, equitable, and trustworthy AI.

We propose WHoW, an evaluation framework for analyzing the facilitation strategies of moderators across different domains/scenarios by examining their motives (Why), dialogue acts (How) and target speaker (Who). Using this framework, we annotated 5,657 moderation sentences with human judges and 15,494 sentences with GPT-4o from two domains: TV debates and radio panel discussions. Comparative analysis demonstrates the framework's cross-domain generalisability and reveals distinct moderation strategies: debate moderators emphasise coordination and facilitate interaction through questions and instructions, while panel discussion moderators prioritize information provision and actively participate in discussions. Our analytical framework works for different moderation scenarios, enhances our understanding of moderation behaviour through automatic large-scale analysis, and facilitates the development of moderator agents.

The constant shifts in social and political contexts, driven by emerging social movements and political events, lead to new forms of hate content and previously unrecognized hate patterns that machine learning models may not have captured. Some recent literature proposes the data augmentation-based techniques to enrich existing hate datasets by incorporating samples that reveal new implicit hate patterns. This approach aims to improve the model's performance on out-of-domain implicit hate instances. It is observed, that further addition of more samples for augmentation results in the decrease of the performance of the model. In this work, we propose a Knowledge Transfer-driven Concept Refinement method that distills and refines the concepts related to implicit hate samples through novel prototype alignment and concept losses, alongside data augmentation based on concept activation vectors. Experiments with several publicly available datasets show that incorporating additional implicit samples reflecting new hate patterns through concept refinement enhances the model's performance, surpassing baseline results while maintaining cross-dataset generalization capabilities.\footnote{DISCLAIMER: This paper contains explicit statements that are potentially offensive.}

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have driven a paradigm shift, where large language models (LLMs) with billions or trillions of parameters are trained on vast datasets, achieving unprecedented success across a series of language tasks. However, despite these successes, LLMs still rely on probabilistic modeling, which often captures spurious correlations rooted in linguistic patterns and social stereotypes, rather than the true causal relationships between entities and events. This limitation renders LLMs vulnerable to issues such as demographic biases, social stereotypes, and LLM hallucinations. These challenges highlight the urgent need to integrate causality into LLMs, moving beyond correlation-driven paradigms to build more reliable and ethically aligned AI systems. While many existing surveys and studies focus on utilizing prompt engineering to activate LLMs for causal knowledge or developing benchmarks to assess their causal reasoning abilities, most of these efforts rely on human intervention to activate pre-trained models. How to embed causality into the training process of LLMs and build more general and intelligent models remains unexplored. Recent research highlights that LLMs function as causal parrots, capable of reciting causal knowledge without truly understanding or applying it. These prompt-based methods are still limited to human interventional improvements. This survey aims to address this gap by exploring how causality can enhance LLMs at every stage of their lifecycle-from token embedding learning and foundation model training to fine-tuning, alignment, inference, and evaluation-paving the way for more interpretable, reliable, and causally-informed models. Additionally, we further outline six promising future directions to advance LLM development, enhance their causal reasoning capabilities, and address the current limitations these models face.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) tools across diverse applications has amplified the importance of addressing societal biases inherent within these technologies. While the NLP community has extensively studied LLM bias, research investigating how non-expert users perceive and interact with biases from these systems remains limited. As these technologies become increasingly prevalent, understanding this question is crucial to inform model developers in their efforts to mitigate bias. To address this gap, this work presents the findings from a university-level competition, which challenged participants to design prompts for eliciting biased outputs from GenAI tools. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the competition submissions and identify a diverse set of biases in GenAI and strategies employed by participants to induce bias in GenAI. Our finding provides unique insights into how non-expert users perceive and interact with biases from GenAI tools.

The advancements in cloud-based Large Languages Models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI-assisted programming. However, their integration into certain local development environments like ones within the Apple software ecosystem (e.g., iOS apps, macOS) remains challenging due to computational demands and sandboxed constraints. This paper presents CAMP, a multi-model AI-assisted programming framework that consists of a local model that employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to retrieve contextual information from the codebase to facilitate context-aware prompt construction thus optimizing the performance of the cloud model, empowering LLMs' capabilities in local Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). The methodology is actualized in Copilot for Xcode, an AI-assisted programming tool crafted for Xcode that employs the RAG module to address software constraints and enables diverse generative programming tasks, including automatic code completion, documentation, error detection, and intelligent user-agent interaction. The results from objective experiments on generated code quality and subjective experiments on user adoption collectively demonstrate the pilot success of the proposed system and mark its significant contributions to the realm of AI-assisted programming.

Large generative models (LMs) are increasingly being considered for high-stakes decision-making. This work considers how such models compare to humans and predictive AI models on a specific case of recidivism prediction. We combine three datasets -- COMPAS predictive AI risk scores, human recidivism judgements, and photos -- into a dataset on which we study the properties of several state-of-the-art, multimodal LMs. Beyond accuracy and bias, we focus on studying human-LM alignment on the task of recidivism prediction. We investigate if these models can be steered towards human decisions, the impact of adding photos, and whether anti-discimination prompting is effective. We find that LMs can be steered to outperform humans and COMPAS using in context-learning. We find anti-discrimination prompting to have unintended effects, causing some models to inhibit themselves and significantly reduce their number of positive predictions.

In an era where cultural preservation is increasingly intertwined with technological innovation, this study introduces a groundbreaking approach to promoting and safeguarding the rich heritage of Taiwanese Hakka culture through the development of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-enhanced chatbot. Traditional large language models (LLMs), while powerful, often fall short in delivering accurate and contextually rich responses, particularly in culturally specific domains. By integrating external databases with generative AI models, RAG technology bridges this gap, empowering chatbots to not only provide precise answers but also resonate deeply with the cultural nuances that are crucial for authentic interactions. This study delves into the intricate process of augmenting the chatbot's knowledge base with targeted cultural data, specifically curated to reflect the unique aspects of Hakka traditions, language, and practices. Through dynamic information retrieval, the RAG-enhanced chatbot becomes a versatile tool capable of handling complex inquiries that demand an in-depth understanding of Hakka cultural context. This is particularly significant in an age where digital platforms often dilute cultural identities, making the role of culturally aware AI systems more critical than ever. System usability studies conducted as part of our research reveal a marked improvement in both user satisfaction and engagement, highlighting the chatbot's effectiveness in fostering a deeper connection with Hakka culture. The feedback underscores the potential of RAG technology to not only enhance user experience but also to serve as a vital instrument in the broader mission of ethnic mainstreaming and cultural celebration.

UPenn Wharton School Associate Professor Ethan Mollick weighs in on the Biden White House's new guidelines for artificial intelligence in the workplace on'Fox News Live.' The parents of a Massachusetts high school senior who used artificial intelligence (AI) for a social studies project have filed a lawsuit against his teachers and the school after their son received detention and a "D" grade. "He's been accused of cheating, and it wasn't cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI," Jennifer Harris, who along with her husband, Dale, are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts' Plymouth County District Court last month against the Hingham High School administration and the school district, told Boston 25 News. The lawsuit alleges that their son will "suffer irreparable harm that is imminent" over the grade that his parents say kept him out of the National Honor Society, which they claim is threatening his standing with top tier colleges. "So, our argument to the school was could you fail him with a 59 instead of a 53 so he can have a B minus? He's applying to top tier schools," Harris told the news station.

The advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have decentralized the responsibility for the transparency of AI usage. Specifically, LLM users are now encouraged or required to disclose the use of LLM-generated content for varied types of real-world tasks. However, an emerging phenomenon, users' secret use of LLM, raises challenges in ensuring end users adhere to the transparency requirement. Our study used mixed-methods with an exploratory survey (125 real-world secret use cases reported) and a controlled experiment among 300 users to investigate the contexts and causes behind the secret use of LLMs. We found that such secretive behavior is often triggered by certain tasks, transcending demographic and personality differences among users. Task types were found to affect users' intentions to use secretive behavior, primarily through influencing perceived external judgment regarding LLM usage. Our results yield important insights for future work on designing interventions to encourage more transparent disclosure of the use of LLMs or other AI technologies.