Law
Neither Valid nor Reliable Investigating the Use of LLMs as Judges
Evaluating natural language generation (NLG) systems remains a core challenge of natural language processing (NLP), further complicated by the rise of large language models (LLMs) that aim to be general-purpose. Recently, large language models as judges (LLJs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional metrics, but their validity remains underexplored. This position paper argues that the current enthusiasm around LLJs may be premature, as their adoption has outpaced rigorous scrutiny of their reliability and validity as evaluators. Drawing on measurement theory from the social sciences, we identify and critically assess four core assumptions underlying the use of LLJs: their ability to act as proxies for human judgment, their capabilities as evaluators, their scalability, and their cost-effectiveness. We examine how each of these assumptions may be challenged by the inherent limitations of LLMs, LLJs, or current practices in NLG evaluation. To ground our analysis, we explore three applications of LLJs: text summarization, data annotation, and safety alignment. Finally, we highlight the need for more responsible evaluation practices in LLJs evaluation, to ensure that their growing role in the field supports, rather than undermines, progress in NLG.
For the first time, biologists observe a humpback whale crossing the Arabian Sea
A female Arabian Sea humpback whale called Luban covered about 4,350 miles on her return trip. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Though more commonly associated with their long migrations from Alaska to Hawaii or showing off for whale watchers off the coast of New England, a unique population of humpback whales call the Arabian Sea home.
FairNet: Dynamic Fairness Correction without Performance Loss via Contrastive Conditional LoRA
Ensuring fairness in machine learning models is a critical challenge. Existing debiasing methods often compromise performance, rely on static correction strategies, and struggle with data sparsity, particularly within minority groups. Furthermore, their utilization of sensitive attributes is often suboptimal, either depending excessively on complete attribute labeling or disregarding these attributes entirely. To overcome these limitations, we propose FairNet, a novel framework for dynamic, instance-level fairness correction. FairNet integrates a bias detector with conditional low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which enables selective activation of the fairness correction mechanism exclusively for instances identified as biased, and thereby preserve performance on unbiased instances. A key contribution is a new contrastive loss function for training the LoRA module, specifically designed to minimize intra-class representation disparities across different sensitive groups and effectively address underfitting in minority groups. The FairNet framework can flexibly handle scenarios with complete, partial, or entirely absent sensitive attribute labels. Theoretical analysis confirms that, under moderate TPR/FPR for the bias detector, FairNet can enhance the performance of the worst group without diminishing overall model performance, and potentially yield slight performance improvements.
7ff65a57e916785a271d97f7236f1323-Paper-Conference.pdf
Membership inference tests aim to determine whether a particular data point was included in a language model's training set. However, recent works have shown that such tests often fail under the strict definition of membership based on exact matching, and have suggested relaxing this definition to include semantic neighbors as members as well. In this work, we show that membership inference tests are still unreliable under this relaxation -- it is possible to poison the training dataset in a way that causes the test to produce incorrect predictions for a target point. We theoretically reveal a trade-off between a test's accuracy and its robustness to poisoning. We also present a concrete instantiation of this poisoning attack and empirically validate its effectiveness. Our results show that it can degrade the performance of existing tests to well below random.
KAIROS: Scalable Model-Agnostic Data Valuation
Data valuation techniques quantify each training example's contribution to model performance, providing a principled basis for data cleaning, acquisition, and selection. Existing valuation methods remain inadequate: model-based techniques depend on a single fitted model and inherit its biases, while algorithm-based approaches like Data Shapley scale poorly due to their need to train multiple models. Recent work has proposed model-agnostic alternatives based on Wasserstein distance between the training set and a clean reference set, but exact computation is expensive and approximations often misrank examples. We introduce KAIROS, a model-agnostic framework that values examples by their contribution to the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between the training set and a clean reference distribution. Unlike Wasserstein methods, MMD admits a closed-form solution that requires no approximations and is scalable to large datasets. Additionally, KAIROS enables efficient online valuation: adding a new batch of m examples requires only O(mN)computation to update all scores, compared to O(N2)in prior work where N is the training set size. Empirical evaluations on noise, mislabeling, and poisoning benchmarks show that KAIROS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and runtime. On ImageNet, KAIROS achieves up to 15 speedup over the fastest baseline while maintaining superior data valuation quality. Our results demonstrate that model-agnostic methods can match or exceed model-based approaches in performance while scaling to large datasets.
Hot pavement can burn your dog's paws
Hot pavement can burn your dog's paws A new app is on a mission to save puppy paws from scorched concrete. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Monitoring temperature is important for protecting your pooch's paws. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .
Rivian faces a class action lawsuit over self-driving in its early vehicles
Plaintiffs claim the company overstated the capabilities of the R1T and R1S. Rivian has been sued on allegations that it made misleading statements about the self-driving capabilities of its R1T truck and R1S SUV. According to the class action complaint brought by Rivian customers, the first-generation models of these vehicles are not capable of the offering the self-driving potential that the company had promised. The plaintiffs argued that Rivian represented that those early models would be capable of level 3 autonomous driving, meaning the vehicle would be able to steer, accelerate and break without driver action. In reality, Rivian manufactured its Gen 1 Vehicles without the hardware, cameras, sensors, and compute to enable hands-free driving and/or Level 3 autonomous operation, the complaint states.