Law
AI Delegates with a Dual Focus: Ensuring Privacy and Strategic Self-Disclosure
Chen, Xi, Zhang, Zhiyang, Yang, Fangkai, Qin, Xiaoting, Du, Chao, Cheng, Xi, Liu, Hangxin, Lin, Qingwei, Rajmohan, Saravan, Zhang, Dongmei, Zhang, Qi
Large language model (LLM)-based AI delegates are increasingly utilized to act on behalf of users, assisting them with a wide range of tasks through conversational interfaces. Despite their advantages, concerns arise regarding the potential risk of privacy leaks, particularly in scenarios involving social interactions. While existing research has focused on protecting privacy by limiting the access of AI delegates to sensitive user information, many social scenarios require disclosing private details to achieve desired outcomes, necessitating a balance between privacy protection and disclosure. To address this challenge, we conduct a pilot study to investigate user preferences for AI delegates across various social relations and task scenarios, and then propose a novel AI delegate system that enables privacy-conscious self-disclosure. Our user study demonstrates that the proposed AI delegate strategically protects privacy, pioneering its use in diverse and dynamic social interactions.
Alignment Between the Decision-Making Logic of LLMs and Human Cognition: A Case Study on Legal LLMs
Chen, Lu, Huang, Yuxuan, Li, Yixing, Jin, Yaohui, Zhao, Shuai, Zheng, Zilong, Zhang, Quanshi
This paper presents a method to evaluate the alignment between the decision-making logic of Large Language Models (LLMs) and human cognition in a case study on legal LLMs. Unlike traditional evaluations on language generation results, we propose to evaluate the correctness of the detailed decision-making logic of an LLM behind its seemingly correct outputs, which represents the core challenge for an LLM to earn human trust. To this end, we quantify the interactions encoded by the LLM as primitive decision-making logic, because recent theoretical achievements have proven several mathematical guarantees of the faithfulness of the interaction-based explanation. We design a set of metrics to evaluate the detailed decision-making logic of LLMs. Experiments show that even when the language generation results appear correct, a significant portion of the internal inference logic contains notable issues.
CopyLens: Dynamically Flagging Copyrighted Sub-Dataset Contributions to LLM Outputs
Ma, Qichao, Zhu, Rui-Jie, Liu, Peiye, Yan, Renye, Zhang, Fahong, Liang, Ling, Li, Meng, Yu, Zhaofei, Wang, Zongwei, Cai, Yimao, Huang, Tiejun
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pervasive due to their knowledge absorption and text-generation capabilities. Concurrently, the copyright issue for pretraining datasets has been a pressing concern, particularly when generation includes specific styles. Previous methods either focus on the defense of identical copyrighted outputs or find interpretability by individual tokens with computational burdens. However, the gap between them exists, where direct assessments of how dataset contributions impact LLM outputs are missing. Once the model providers ensure copyright protection for data holders, a more mature LLM community can be established. To address these limitations, we introduce CopyLens, a new framework to analyze how copyrighted datasets may influence LLM responses. Specifically, a two-stage approach is employed: First, based on the uniqueness of pretraining data in the embedding space, token representations are initially fused for potential copyrighted texts, followed by a lightweight LSTM-based network to analyze dataset contributions. With such a prior, a contrastive-learning-based non-copyright OOD detector is designed. Our framework can dynamically face different situations and bridge the gap between current copyright detection methods. Experiments show that CopyLens improves efficiency and accuracy by 15.2% over our proposed baseline, 58.7% over prompt engineering methods, and 0.21 AUC over OOD detection baselines.
The LLM Effect: Are Humans Truly Using LLMs, or Are They Being Influenced By Them Instead?
Choi, Alexander S., Akter, Syeda Sabrina, Singh, JP, Anastasopoulos, Antonios
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown capabilities close to human performance in various analytical tasks, leading researchers to use them for time and labor-intensive analyses. However, their capability to handle highly specialized and open-ended tasks in domains like policy studies remains in question. This paper investigates the efficiency and accuracy of LLMs in specialized tasks through a structured user study focusing on Human-LLM partnership. The study, conducted in two stages-Topic Discovery and Topic Assignment-integrates LLMs with expert annotators to observe the impact of LLM suggestions on what is usually human-only analysis. Results indicate that LLM-generated topic lists have significant overlap with human generated topic lists, with minor hiccups in missing document-specific topics. However, LLM suggestions may significantly improve task completion speed, but at the same time introduce anchoring bias, potentially affecting the depth and nuance of the analysis, raising a critical question about the trade-off between increased efficiency and the risk of biased analysis.
SWEb: A Large Web Dataset for the Scandinavian Languages
Norlund, Tobias, Isbister, Tim, Gyllensten, Amaru Cuba, Santos, Paul Dos, Petrelli, Danila, Ekgren, Ariel, Sahlgren, Magnus
This paper presents the hitherto largest pretraining dataset for the Scandinavian languages: the Scandinavian WEb (SWEb), comprising over one trillion tokens. The paper details the collection and processing pipeline, and introduces a novel model-based text extractor that significantly reduces complexity in comparison with rule-based approaches. We also introduce a new cloze-style benchmark for evaluating language models in Swedish, and use this test to compare models trained on the SWEb data to models trained on FineWeb, with competitive results. All data, models and code are shared openly. Large language models have made significant strides in recent years due to their general capabilities in language-processing tasks. This progress has been largely driven by the development of extensive and high-quality pretraining datasets sourced from open web data (Wenzek et al., 2020; Brown et al., 2020; Abadji et al., 2022; Penedo et al., 2023; 2024). However, the majority of research aimed at improving pretraining data focuses on high-resource languages such as English. Our goal is to create a large-scale and high-performing open pretraining dataset specifically for the Scandinavian (north-germanic) languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. Existing large-scale datasets for these languages primarily include mC4 (Xue et al., 2021), OSCAR (Abadji et al., 2022), and HPLT Datasets 1.2 (de Gibert et al., 2024). The Scandinavian portion of mC4 comprises approximately 100B tokens, 10B tokens for OSCAR 23.01, and 35B tokens for HPLT, which are all relatively small numbers considering that state-of-the-art large language models today are trained on trillions of high-quality tokens.
Measuring and Improving Persuasiveness of Large Language Models
Singh, Somesh, Singla, Yaman K, SI, Harini, Krishnamurthy, Balaji
LLMs are increasingly being used in workflows involving generating content to be consumed by humans (e.g., marketing) and also in directly interacting with humans (e.g., through chatbots). The development of such systems that are capable of generating verifiably persuasive messages presents both opportunities and challenges for society. On the one hand, such systems could positively impact domains like advertising and social good, such as addressing drug addiction, and on the other, they could be misused for spreading misinformation and shaping political opinions. To channel LLMs' impact on society, we need to develop systems to measure and benchmark their persuasiveness. With this motivation, we introduce PersuasionBench and PersuasionArena, the first large-scale benchmark and arena containing a battery of tasks to measure the persuasion ability of generative models automatically. We investigate to what extent LLMs know and leverage linguistic patterns that can help them generate more persuasive language. Our findings indicate that the persuasiveness of LLMs correlates positively with model size, but smaller models can also be made to have a higher persuasiveness than much larger models. Notably, targeted training using synthetic and natural datasets significantly enhances smaller models' persuasive capabilities, challenging scale-dependent assumptions. Our findings carry key implications for both model developers and policymakers. For instance, while the EU AI Act and California's SB-1047 aim to regulate AI models based on the number of floating point operations, we demonstrate that simple metrics like this alone fail to capture the full scope of AI's societal impact. We invite the community to explore and contribute to PersuasionArena and PersuasionBench, available at https://bit.ly/measure-persuasion, to advance our understanding of AI-driven persuasion and its societal implications.
Flatpack coffins and robot dogs: patents applications show UK inventions of 2023
A robot dog that does the vacuuming, a flatpack coffin and a cross between a cookie and a cake were among the things that UK-based inventors thought up last year. A Guardian analysis of patent applications listed by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) found 5,955 involving at least one UK-based inventor had been published in 2023. They included a lying-down computer table, invented by Alex May, 31, from London. The device involves a downwards-facing computer monitor that can be viewed from under a desk that can also operate as a sitting or standing desk if needed. May, who has had chronic back issues since his teenage years, came up with the desk after searching for a more comfortable way to use his computer.
Code-Driven Law NO, Normware SI!
The concept of code-driven law, i.e. of "legal norms or policies that have been articulated in computer code" by some actors with normative competence, has been convincingly elaborated by Hildebrandt [1]. Its introduction has the merit to refocus the discussion on the role of artificial devices in the legal activity, rather than on ontological positions expressed under code-is-law or law-is-code banners, which are present, with various interpretations and changing fortunes, in the literature and practice of contemporary regulatory technologies, and technology-oriented legal scholarship (see the overview in [2]). According to Hildebrandt, code-driven law should be distinguished from data-driven law, i.e. computational decision-making derived from statistical or other inductive methods, and from text-driven law, i.e. the legal activity performed by humans by means of sources of norms such as statutory and case law. A crucial difference between these forms of "law" is that the linguistic artifacts used in text-driven law are characterized by open-textured concepts (e.g.
Comparative Global AI Regulation: Policy Perspectives from the EU, China, and the US
Chun, Jon, de Witt, Christian Schroeder, Elkins, Katherine
As a powerful and rapidly advancing dual-use technology, AI offers both immense benefits and worrisome risks. In response, governing bodies around the world are developing a range of regulatory AI laws and policies. This paper compares three distinct approaches taken by the EU, China and the US. Within the US, we explore AI regulation at both the federal and state level, with a focus on California's pending Senate Bill 1047. Each regulatory system reflects distinct cultural, political and economic perspectives. Each also highlights differing regional perspectives on regulatory risk-benefit tradeoffs, with divergent judgments on the balance between safety versus innovation and cooperation versus competition. Finally, differences between regulatory frameworks reflect contrastive stances in regards to trust in centralized authority versus trust in a more decentralized free market of self-interested stakeholders. Taken together, these varied approaches to AI innovation and regulation influence each other, the broader international community, and the future of AI regulation.
Latent Feature Mining for Predictive Model Enhancement with Large Language Models
Li, Bingxuan, Shi, Pengyi, Ward, Amy
Predictive modeling often faces challenges due to limited data availability and quality, especially in domains where collected features are weakly correlated with outcomes and where additional feature collection is constrained by ethical or practical difficulties. Traditional machine learning (ML) models struggle to incorporate unobserved yet critical factors. In this work, we introduce an effective approach to formulate latent feature mining as text-to-text propositional logical reasoning. We propose FLAME (Faithful Latent Feature Mining for Predictive Model Enhancement), a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to augment observed features with latent features and enhance the predictive power of ML models in downstream tasks. Our framework is generalizable across various domains with necessary domain-specific adaptation, as it is designed to incorporate contextual information unique to each area, ensuring effective transfer to different areas facing similar data availability challenges. We validate our framework with two case studies: (1) the criminal justice system, a domain characterized by limited and ethically challenging data collection; (2) the healthcare domain, where patient privacy concerns and the complexity of medical data limit comprehensive feature collection. Our results show that inferred latent features align well with ground truth labels and significantly enhance the downstream classifier.