Law
Lessons for Editors of AI Incidents from the AI Incident Database
Paeth, Kevin, Atherton, Daniel, Pittaras, Nikiforos, Frase, Heather, McGregor, Sean
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly deployed across the world, they are also increasingly implicated in AI incidents - harm events to individuals and society. As a result, industry, civil society, and governments worldwide are developing best practices and regulations for monitoring and analyzing AI incidents. The AI Incident Database (AIID) is a project that catalogs AI incidents and supports further research by providing a platform to classify incidents for different operational and research-oriented goals. This study reviews the AIID's dataset of 750+ AI incidents and two independent taxonomies applied to these incidents to identify common challenges to indexing and analyzing AI incidents. We find that certain patterns of AI incidents present structural ambiguities that challenge incident databasing and explore how epistemic uncertainty in AI incident reporting is unavoidable. We therefore report mitigations to make incident processes more robust to uncertainty related to cause, extent of harm, severity, or technical details of implicated systems. With these findings, we discuss how to develop future AI incident reporting practices.
HelloBench: Evaluating Long Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models
Que, Haoran, Duan, Feiyu, He, Liqun, Mou, Yutao, Zhou, Wangchunshu, Liu, Jiaheng, Rong, Wenge, Wang, Zekun Moore, Yang, Jian, Zhang, Ge, Peng, Junran, Zhang, Zhaoxiang, Zhang, Songyang, Chen, Kai
In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks (e.g., long-context understanding), and many benchmarks have been proposed. However, we observe that long text generation capabilities are not well investigated. Therefore, we introduce the Hierarchical Long Text Generation Benchmark (HelloBench), a comprehensive, in-the-wild, and open-ended benchmark to evaluate LLMs' performance in generating long text. Based on Bloom's Taxonomy, HelloBench categorizes long text generation tasks into five subtasks: open-ended QA, summarization, chat, text completion, and heuristic text generation. Besides, we propose Hierarchical Long Text Evaluation (HelloEval), a human-aligned evaluation method that significantly reduces the time and effort required for human evaluation while maintaining a high correlation with human evaluation. We have conducted extensive experiments across around 30 mainstream LLMs and observed that the current LLMs lack long text generation capabilities. Specifically, first, regardless of whether the instructions include explicit or implicit length constraints, we observe that most LLMs cannot generate text that is longer than 4000 words. Second, we observe that while some LLMs can generate longer text, many issues exist (e.g., severe repetition and quality degradation). Third, to demonstrate the effectiveness of HelloEval, we compare HelloEval with traditional metrics (e.g., ROUGE, BLEU, etc.) and LLM-as-a-Judge methods, which show that HelloEval has the highest correlation with human evaluation. We release our code in https://github.com/Quehry/HelloBench.
Five questions and answers about artificial intelligence
Prieto, Alberto, Prieto, Beatriz
Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are generating much controversy in society, often without scientific basis. As occurred the development of other emerging technologies, such as the introduction of electricity in the early 20th century, AI causes both fascination and fear. Following the advice of the philosopher R.W. Emerson's advice'the knowledge is the antidote to fear', this paper seeks to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about AI. To this end, it reflects on the following questions: the origins of AI, its possible future evolution, its ability to show feelings, the associated threats and dangers, and the concept of AI singularity Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Fourth Industrial Revolution, Beginnings of AI, Development of AI, Automatic learning, Machine learning, Feelings in AI, Dangers of AI, Advantages of AI, Singularity of AI, Superintelligence, Frictionless Reproducibility (FR), Large Language Models, General AI (GAI), Intelligence, GPT Chat.
XTRUST: On the Multilingual Trustworthiness of Large Language Models
Li, Yahan, Wang, Yi, Chang, Yi, Wu, Yuan
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, capturing the attention of both practitioners and the broader public. A key question that now preoccupies the AI community concerns the capabilities and limitations of these models, with trustworthiness emerging as a central issue, particularly as LLMs are increasingly applied in sensitive fields like healthcare and finance, where errors can have serious consequences. However, most previous studies on the trustworthiness of LLMs have been limited to a single language, typically the predominant one in the dataset, such as English. In response to the growing global deployment of LLMs, we introduce XTRUST, the first comprehensive multilingual trustworthiness benchmark. XTRUST encompasses a diverse range of topics, including illegal activities, hallucination, out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness, physical and mental health, toxicity, fairness, misinformation, privacy, and machine ethics, across 10 different languages. Using XTRUST, we conduct an empirical evaluation of the multilingual trustworthiness of five widely used LLMs, offering an in-depth analysis of their performance across languages and tasks. Our results indicate that many LLMs struggle with certain low-resource languages, such as Arabic and Russian, highlighting the considerable room for improvement in the multilingual trustworthiness of current language models. The code is available at https://github.com/LluckyYH/XTRUST.
Beyond the binary: Limitations and possibilities of gender-related speech technology research
Sanchez, Ariadna, Ross, Alice, Markl, Nina
This paper presents a review of 107 research papers relating to speech and sex or gender in ISCA Interspeech publications between 2013 and 2023. We note the scarcity of work on this topic and find that terminology, particularly the word gender, is used in ways that are underspecified and often out of step with the prevailing view in social sciences that gender is socially constructed and is a spectrum as opposed to a binary category. We draw attention to the potential problems that this can cause for already marginalised groups, and suggest some questions for researchers to ask themselves when undertaking work on speech and gender.
The Morning After: SpaceX gets a surprising new enemy
If events in the last few years have felt like a higher power playing Mad Libs with our lives, then it looks as if it's running out of options. "SpaceX," you imagine it pulling out "gets sued by…" and then the sounds of paper rustling until it says, "Cards Against Humanity." Turns out the silly game jokesters own an acre of land near to SpaceX's facility in Texas, which the latter has been using for its own purposes. Cards Against Humanity has filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, alleging the rocket company has been trespassing on land it bought back in 2017. The lawsuit says the previously pristine land has been turned into an ersatz staging ground and parking lot for nearby construction work.
Rethinking LLM memorization
A central question in the discussion of large language models (LLMs) concerns the extent to which they memorize their training data versus how they generalize to new tasks and settings. Most practitioners seem to (at least informally) believe that LLMs do some degree of both: they clearly memorize parts of the training data--for example, they are often able to reproduce large portions of training data verbatim [Carlini et al., 2023]--but they also seem to learn from this data, allowing them to generalize to new settings. The precise extent to which they do one or the other has massive implications for the practical and legal aspects of such models [Cooper et al., 2023]. Do LLMs truly produce new content, or do they only remix their training data? When dealing with humans, we distinguish plagiarizing content from learning from it, but how should this extend to LLMs?
Improving Emotional Support Delivery in Text-Based Community Safety Reporting Using Large Language Models
Liu, Yiren, Li, Yerong, Mayfield, Ryan, Huang, Yun
Emotional support is a crucial aspect of communication between community members and police dispatchers during incident reporting. However, there is a lack of understanding about how emotional support is delivered through text-based systems, especially in various non-emergency contexts. In this study, we analyzed two years of chat logs comprising 57,114 messages across 8,239 incidents from 130 higher education institutions. Our empirical findings revealed significant variations in emotional support provided by dispatchers, influenced by the type of incident, service time, and a noticeable decline in support over time across multiple organizations. To improve the consistency and quality of emotional support, we developed and implemented a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), named dispatcherLLM. We evaluated dispatcherLLM by comparing its generated responses to those of human dispatchers and other off-the-shelf models using real chat messages. Additionally, we conducted a human evaluation to assess the perceived effectiveness of the support provided by dispatcherLLM. This study not only contributes new empirical understandings of emotional support in text-based dispatch systems but also demonstrates the significant potential of generative AI in improving service delivery.
UTrace: Poisoning Forensics for Private Collaborative Learning
Rose, Evan, Lycklama, Hidde, Chaudhari, Harsh, Hithnawi, Anwar, Oprea, Alina
Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) enables multiple data owners to contribute their data privately to a set of servers that run a secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocol to train a joint ML model. In these protocols, the input data remains private throughout the training process, and only the resulting model is made available. While this approach benefits privacy, it also exacerbates the risks of data poisoning, where compromised data owners induce undesirable model behavior by contributing malicious datasets. Existing MPC mechanisms can mitigate certain poisoning attacks, but these measures are not exhaustive. To complement existing poisoning defenses, we introduce UTrace: a framework for User-level Traceback of poisoning attacks in PPML. Utrace computes user responsibility scores using gradient similarity metrics aggregated across the most relevant samples in an owner's dataset. UTrace is effective at low poisoning rates and is resilient to poisoning attacks distributed across multiple data owners, unlike existing unlearning-based methods. We introduce methods for checkpointing gradients with low storage overhead, enabling traceback in the absence of data owners at deployment time. We also design several optimizations that reduce traceback time and communication in MPC. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of UTrace across four datasets from three data modalities (vision, text, and malware) and show its effectiveness against 10 poisoning attacks.
AdapFair: Ensuring Continuous Fairness for Machine Learning Operations
Huang, Yinghui, Tang, Zihao, Chang, Xiangyu
The biases and discrimination of machine learning algorithms have attracted significant attention, leading to the development of various algorithms tailored to specific contexts. However, these solutions often fall short of addressing fairness issues inherent in machine learning operations. In this paper, we present a debiasing framework designed to find an optimal fair transformation of input data that maximally preserves data predictability. A distinctive feature of our approach is its flexibility and efficiency. It can be integrated with any downstream black-box classifiers, providing continuous fairness guarantees with minimal retraining efforts, even in the face of frequent data drifts, evolving fairness requirements, and batches of similar tasks. To achieve this, we leverage the normalizing flows to enable efficient, information-preserving data transformation, ensuring that no critical information is lost during the debiasing process. Additionally, we incorporate the Wasserstein distance as the unfairness measure to guide the optimization of data transformations. Finally, we introduce an efficient optimization algorithm with closed-formed gradient computations, making our framework scalable and suitable for dynamic, real-world environments.