Law
Ethical Leadership in the Age of AI Challenges, Opportunities and Framework for Ethical Leadership
Artificial Intelligence is currently and rapidly changing the way organizations and businesses operate. Ethical leadership has become significantly important since organizations and businesses across various sectors are evolving with AI. Organizations and businesses may be facing several challenges and potential opportunities when using AI. Ethical leadership plays a central role in guiding organizations in facing those challenges and maximizing on those opportunities. This article explores the essence of ethical leadership in the age of AI, starting with a simplified introduction of ethical leadership and AI, then dives into an understanding of ethical leadership, its characteristics and importance, the ethical challenges AI causes including bias in AI algorithms. The opportunities for ethical leadership in the age of AI answers the question: What actionable strategies can leaders employ to address the challenges and leverage opportunities? and describes the benefits for organizations through these opportunities. A proposed framework for ethical leadership is presented in this article, incorporating the core components: fairness, transparency, sustainability etc. Through the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, case studies of ethical leadership in AI, and recommendations, this article emphasizes that ethical leadership in the age of AI is morally essential and strategically advantageous.
Functional Gradient Flows for Constrained Sampling
Zhang, Shiyue, Yu, Longlin, Cheng, Ziheng, Zhang, Cheng
Recently, through a unified gradient flow perspective of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have been proposed that tend to combine the best of both worlds. While typical ParVIs such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) approximate the gradient flow within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), many attempts have been made recently to replace RKHS with more expressive function spaces, such as neural networks. While successful, these methods are mainly designed for sampling from unconstrained domains. In this paper, we offer a general solution to constrained sampling by introducing a boundary condition for the gradient flow which would confine the particles within the specific domain. This allows us to propose a new functional gradient ParVI method for constrained sampling, called constrained functional gradient flow (CFG), with provable continuous-time convergence in total variation (TV). We also present novel numerical strategies to handle the boundary integral term arising from the domain constraints. Our theory and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Google parent Alphabet sees double-digit growth as AI bets pay off
Alphabet, parent of Google and YouTube, saw a third straight quarter of better-than-anticipated gains as it reported earnings on Tuesday. The tech giant had largely exceeded analyst expectations for the previous two quarters, and Tuesday's results showed growth in both digital advertising and demand for Google Cloud. Shares rose in after-hours training. "The momentum across the company is extraordinary. Our commitment to innovation, as well as our long-term focus and investment in AI, are paying off with consumers and partners benefiting from our AI tools," said the CEO, Sundar Pichai. Analysts expected 12% year-on-year revenue growth, to 86.23bn, and earnings per share of 1.85.
Assessing the Auditability of AI-integrating Systems: A Framework and Learning Analytics Case Study
Fernsel, Linda, Kalff, Yannick, Simbeck, Katharina
Audits contribute to the trustworthiness of Learning Analytics (LA) systems that integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and may be legally required in the future. We argue that the efficacy of an audit depends on the auditability of the audited system. Therefore, systems need to be designed with auditability in mind. We present a framework for assessing the auditability of AI-integrating systems that consists of three parts: (1) Verifiable claims about the validity, utility and ethics of the system, (2) Evidence on subjects (data, models or the system) in different types (documentation, raw sources and logs) to back or refute claims, (3) Evidence must be accessible to auditors via technical means (APIs, monitoring tools, explainable AI, etc.). We apply the framework to assess the auditability of Moodle's dropout prediction system and a prototype AI-based LA. We find that Moodle's auditability is limited by incomplete documentation, insufficient monitoring capabilities and a lack of available test data. The framework supports assessing the auditability of AI-based LA systems in use and improves the design of auditable systems and thus of audits.
Personalization of Large Language Models: A Survey
Zhang, Zhehao, Rossi, Ryan A., Kveton, Branislav, Shao, Yijia, Yang, Diyi, Zamani, Hamed, Dernoncourt, Franck, Barrow, Joe, Yu, Tong, Kim, Sungchul, Zhang, Ruiyi, Gu, Jiuxiang, Derr, Tyler, Chen, Hongjie, Wu, Junda, Chen, Xiang, Wang, Zichao, Mitra, Subrata, Lipka, Nedim, Ahmed, Nesreen, Wang, Yu
Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become increasingly important with a wide range of applications. Despite the importance and recent progress, most existing works on personalized LLMs have focused either entirely on (a) personalized text generation or (b) leveraging LLMs for personalization-related downstream applications, such as recommendation systems. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two separate main directions for the first time by introducing a taxonomy for personalized LLM usage and summarizing the key differences and challenges. We provide a formalization of the foundations of personalized LLMs that consolidates and expands notions of personalization of LLMs, defining and discussing novel facets of personalization, usage, and desiderata of personalized LLMs. We then unify the literature across these diverse fields and usage scenarios by proposing systematic taxonomies for the granularity of personalization, personalization techniques, datasets, evaluation methods, and applications of personalized LLMs. Finally, we highlight challenges and important open problems that remain to be addressed. By unifying and surveying recent research using the proposed taxonomies, we aim to provide a clear guide to the existing literature and different facets of personalization in LLMs, empowering both researchers and practitioners.
Is Our Chatbot Telling Lies? Assessing Correctness of an LLM-based Dutch Support Chatbot
Lassche, Herman, Overeem, Michiel, Rastogi, Ayushi
Companies support their customers using live chats and chatbots to gain their loyalty. AFAS is a Dutch company aiming to leverage the opportunity large language models (LLMs) offer to answer customer queries with minimal to no input from its customer support team. Adding to its complexity, it is unclear what makes a response correct, and that too in Dutch. Further, with minimal data available for training, the challenge is to identify whether an answer generated by a large language model is correct and do it on the fly. This study is the first to define the correctness of a response based on how the support team at AFAS makes decisions. It leverages literature on natural language generation and automated answer grading systems to automate the decision-making of the customer support team. We investigated questions requiring a binary response (e.g., Would it be possible to adjust tax rates manually?) or instructions (e.g., How would I adjust tax rate manually?) to test how close our automated approach reaches support rating. Our approach can identify wrong messages in 55\% of the cases. This work shows the viability of automatically assessing when our chatbot tell lies.
Evaluating utility in synthetic banking microdata applications
Financial regulators such as central banks collect vast amounts of data, but access to the resulting fine-grained banking microdata is severely restricted by banking secrecy laws. Recent developments have resulted in mechanisms that generate faithful synthetic data, but current evaluation frameworks lack a focus on the specific challenges of banking institutions and microdata. We develop a framework that considers the utility and privacy requirements of regulators, and apply this to financial usage indices, term deposit yield curves, and credit card transition matrices. Using the Central Bank of Paraguay's data, we provide the first implementation of synthetic banking microdata using a central bank's collected information, with the resulting synthetic datasets for all three domain applications being publicly available and featuring information not yet released in statistical disclosure. We find that applications less susceptible to post-processing information loss, which are based on frequency tables, are particularly suited for this approach, and that marginal-based inference mechanisms to outperform generative adversarial network models for these applications. Our results demonstrate that synthetic data generation is a promising privacy-enhancing technology for financial regulators seeking to complement their statistical disclosure, while highlighting the crucial role of evaluating such endeavors in terms of utility and privacy requirements.
Image2Struct: Benchmarking Structure Extraction for Vision-Language Models
Roberts, Josselin Somerville, Lee, Tony, Wong, Chi Heem, Yasunaga, Michihiro, Mai, Yifan, Liang, Percy
We introduce Image2Struct, a benchmark to evaluate vision-language models (VLMs) on extracting structure from images. Our benchmark 1) captures real-world use cases, 2) is fully automatic and does not require human judgment, and 3) is based on a renewable stream of fresh data. In Image2Struct, VLMs are prompted to generate the underlying structure (e.g., LaTeX code or HTML) from an input image (e.g., webpage screenshot). The structure is then rendered to produce an output image (e.g., rendered webpage), which is compared against the input image to produce a similarity score. This round-trip evaluation allows us to quantitatively evaluate VLMs on tasks with multiple valid structures. We create a pipeline that downloads fresh data from active online communities upon execution and evaluates the VLMs without human intervention. We introduce three domains (Webpages, LaTeX, and Musical Scores) and use five image metrics (pixel similarity, cosine similarity between the Inception vectors, learned perceptual image patch similarity, structural similarity index measure, and earth mover similarity) that allow efficient and automatic comparison between pairs of images. We evaluate Image2Struct on 14 prominent VLMs and find that scores vary widely, indicating that Image2Struct can differentiate between the performances of different VLMs. Additionally, the best score varies considerably across domains (e.g., 0.402 on sheet music vs. 0.830 on LaTeX equations), indicating that Image2Struct contains tasks of varying difficulty. For transparency, we release the full results at https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/image2struct/v1.0.1/.
DISCERN: Decoding Systematic Errors in Natural Language for Text Classifiers
Menon, Rakesh R., Srivastava, Shashank
Despite their high predictive accuracies, current machine learning systems often exhibit systematic biases stemming from annotation artifacts or insufficient support for certain classes in the dataset. Recent work proposes automatic methods for identifying and explaining systematic biases using keywords. We introduce DISCERN, a framework for interpreting systematic biases in text classifiers using language explanations. DISCERN iteratively generates precise natural language descriptions of systematic errors by employing an interactive loop between two large language models. Finally, we use the descriptions to improve classifiers by augmenting classifier training sets with synthetically generated instances or annotated examples via active learning. On three text-classification datasets, we demonstrate that language explanations from our framework induce consistent performance improvements that go beyond what is achievable with exemplars of systematic bias. Finally, in human evaluations, we show that users can interpret systematic biases more effectively (by over 25% relative) and efficiently when described through language explanations as opposed to cluster exemplars.
EconoJax: A Fast & Scalable Economic Simulation in Jax
Ponse, Koen, Plaat, Aske, van Stein, Niki, Moerland, Thomas M.
Accurate economic simulations often require many experimental runs, particularly when combined with reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, training reinforcement learning agents in multi-agent economic environments can be slow. This paper introduces EconoJax, a fast simulated economy, based on the AI economist. EconoJax, and its training pipeline, are completely written in JAX. This allows EconoJax to scale to large population sizes and perform large experiments, while keeping training times within minutes. Through experiments with populations of 100 agents, we show how real-world economic behavior emerges through training within 15 minutes, in contrast to previous work that required several days. To aid and inspire researchers to build more rich and dynamic economic simulations, we open-source EconoJax on Github at: https://github.com/ponseko/econojax.