Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on already marginalized populations. Despite growing mitigation efforts to develop safety safeguards, such as supervised safety-oriented fine-tuning and leveraging safe reinforcement learning from human feedback, multiple concerns regarding the safety and ingrained biases in these models remain. Furthermore, previous work has demonstrated that models optimized for safety often display exaggerated safety behaviors, such as a tendency to refrain from responding to certain requests as a precautionary measure. As such, a clear trade-off between the helpfulness and safety of these models has been documented in the literature. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of safety measures by evaluating models on already mitigated biases. Using the case of Llama 2 as an example, we illustrate how LLMs' safety responses can still encode harmful assumptions. To do so, we create a set of non-toxic prompts, which we then use to evaluate Llama models. Through our new taxonomy of LLMs responses to users, we observe that the safety/helpfulness trade-offs are more pronounced for certain demographic groups which can lead to quality-of-service harms for marginalized populations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly ubiquitous, yet their ability to retain and reason about temporal information remains limited, hindering their application in real-world scenarios where understanding the sequential nature of events is crucial. Our study experiments with 12 state-of-the-art models (ranging from 2B to 70B+ parameters) on a novel numerical-temporal dataset, \textbf{TempUN}, spanning from 10,000 BCE to 2100 CE, to uncover significant temporal retention and comprehension limitations. We propose six metrics to assess three learning paradigms to enhance temporal knowledge acquisition. Our findings reveal that open-source models exhibit knowledge gaps more frequently, suggesting a trade-off between limited knowledge and incorrect responses. Additionally, various fine-tuning approaches significantly improved performance, reducing incorrect outputs and impacting the identification of 'information not available' in the generations. The associated dataset and code are available at (https://github.com/lingoiitgn/TempUN).

In Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) generate vast data sets that can be leveraged by Artificial Intelligence (AI) for applications including predictive maintenance and production planning. However, despite the demonstrated potential of AI, its widespread adoption in sectors like manufacturing remains limited. Our comprehensive review of recent literature, including standards and reports, pinpoints key challenges: system integration, data-related issues, managing workforce-related concerns and ensuring trustworthy AI. A quantitative analysis highlights particular challenges and topics that are important for practitioners but still need to be sufficiently investigated by academics. The paper briefly discusses existing solutions to these challenges and proposes avenues for future research. We hope that this survey serves as a resource for practitioners evaluating the cost-benefit implications of AI in CPS and for researchers aiming to address these urgent challenges.

We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist

We introduce the Concept Bottleneck Large Language Model (CB-LLM), a pioneering approach to creating inherently interpretable Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional black-box LLMs that rely on post-hoc interpretation methods with limited neuron function insights, CB-LLM sets a new standard with its built-in interpretability, scalability, and ability to provide clear, accurate explanations. This innovation not only advances transparency in language models but also enhances their effectiveness. Our unique Automatic Concept Correction (ACC) strategy successfully narrows the performance gap with conventional black-box LLMs, positioning CB-LLM as a model that combines the high accuracy of traditional LLMs with the added benefit of clear interpretability -- a feature markedly absent in existing LLMs.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. In this special edition episode we hear vox-pops recorded at the AI Ethics, Risks and Safety Conference in Bristol on the 15th of May 2024. We hear about AI regulations, AI Standards, AI Ethics frameworks, principles, ethics guiding research, awareness of the ethics of AI, and explainable AI. This podcast was created and is run by Ben Byford and collaborators. The podcast, and other content was first created to extend Ben's growing interest in both the AI domain and in the associated ethics.

Algorithmic price collusion facilitated by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms raises significant concerns. We examine how AI agents using Q-learning engage in tacit collusion in two-sided markets. Our experiments reveal that AI-driven platforms achieve higher collusion levels compared to Bertrand competition. Increased network externalities significantly enhance collusion, suggesting AI algorithms exploit them to maximize profits. Higher user heterogeneity or greater utility from outside options generally reduce collusion, while higher discount rates increase it. Tacit collusion remains feasible even at low discount rates. To mitigate collusive behavior and inform potential regulatory measures, we propose incorporating a penalty term in the Q-learning algorithm.

Recent years have witnessed a growing call for renewed emphasis on neuroscience-inspired approaches in artificial intelligence research, under the banner of $\textit{NeuroAI}$. This is exemplified by recent attention gained by predictive coding networks (PCNs) within machine learning (ML). PCNs are based on the neuroscientific framework of predictive coding (PC), which views the brain as a hierarchical Bayesian inference model that minimizes prediction errors from feedback connections. PCNs trained with inference learning (IL) have potential advantages to traditional feedforward neural networks (FNNs) trained with backpropagation. While historically more computationally intensive, recent improvements in IL have shown that it can be more efficient than backpropagation with sufficient parallelization, making PCNs promising alternatives for large-scale applications and neuromorphic hardware. Moreover, PCNs can be mathematically considered as a superset of traditional FNNs, which substantially extends the range of possible architectures for both supervised and unsupervised learning. In this work, we provide a comprehensive review as well as a formal specification of PCNs, in particular placing them in the context of modern ML methods, and positioning PC as a versatile and promising framework worthy of further study by the ML community.

Spectroscopic techniques are essential tools for determining the structure of molecules. Different spectroscopic techniques, such as Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Infrared spectroscopy, and Mass Spectrometry, provide insight into the molecular structure, including the presence or absence of functional groups. Chemists leverage the complementary nature of the different methods to their advantage. However, the lack of a comprehensive multimodal dataset, containing spectra from a variety of spectroscopic techniques, has limited machine-learning approaches mostly to single-modality tasks for predicting molecular structures from spectra. Here we introduce a dataset comprising simulated $^1$H-NMR, $^{13}$C-NMR, HSQC-NMR, Infrared, and Mass spectra (positive and negative ion modes) for 790k molecules extracted from chemical reactions in patent data. This dataset enables the development of foundation models for integrating information from multiple spectroscopic modalities, emulating the approach employed by human experts. Additionally, we provide benchmarks for evaluating single-modality tasks such as structure elucidation, predicting the spectra for a target molecule, and functional group predictions. This dataset has the potential automate structure elucidation, streamlining the molecular discovery pipeline from synthesis to structure determination. The dataset and code for the benchmarks can be found at https://rxn4chemistry.github.io/multimodal-spectroscopic-dataset.

This paper presents CaseGPT, an innovative approach that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to enhance case-based reasoning in the healthcare and legal sectors. The system addresses the challenges of traditional database queries by enabling fuzzy searches based on imprecise descriptions, thereby improving data searchability and usability. CaseGPT not only retrieves relevant case data but also generates insightful suggestions and recommendations based on patterns discerned from existing case data. This functionality proves especially valuable for tasks such as medical diagnostics, legal precedent research, and case strategy formulation. The paper includes an in-depth discussion of the system's methodology, its performance in both medical and legal domains, and its potential for future applications. Our experiments demonstrate that CaseGPT significantly outperforms traditional keyword-based and simple LLM-based systems in terms of precision, recall, and efficiency.