Law
Intersectional Unfairness Discovery
Xu, Gezheng, Chen, Qi, Ling, Charles, Wang, Boyu, Shui, Changjian
AI systems have been shown to produce unfair results for certain subgroups of population, highlighting the need to understand bias on certain sensitive attributes. Current research often falls short, primarily focusing on the subgroups characterized by a single sensitive attribute, while neglecting the nature of intersectional fairness of multiple sensitive attributes. This paper focuses on its one fundamental aspect by discovering diverse high-bias subgroups under intersectional sensitive attributes. Specifically, we propose a Bias-Guided Generative Network (BGGN). By treating each bias value as a reward, BGGN efficiently generates high-bias intersectional sensitive attributes. Experiments on real-world text and image datasets demonstrate a diverse and efficient discovery of BGGN. To further evaluate the generated unseen but possible unfair intersectional sensitive attributes, we formulate them as prompts and use modern generative AI to produce new texts and images. The results of frequently generating biased data provides new insights of discovering potential unfairness in popular modern generative AI systems. Warning: This paper contains generative examples that are offensive in nature.
Legal Judgment Reimagined: PredEx and the Rise of Intelligent AI Interpretation in Indian Courts
Nigam, Shubham Kumar, Sharma, Anurag, Khanna, Danush, Shallum, Noel, Ghosh, Kripabandhu, Bhattacharya, Arnab
In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), predicting judicial outcomes poses significant challenges due to the complexity of legal proceedings and the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. Addressing this, we introduce \textbf{Pred}iction with \textbf{Ex}planation (\texttt{PredEx}), the largest expert-annotated dataset for legal judgment prediction and explanation in the Indian context, featuring over 15,000 annotations. This groundbreaking corpus significantly enhances the training and evaluation of AI models in legal analysis, with innovations including the application of instruction tuning to LLMs. This method has markedly improved the predictive accuracy and explanatory depth of these models for legal judgments. We employed various transformer-based models, tailored for both general and Indian legal contexts. Through rigorous lexical, semantic, and expert assessments, our models effectively leverage \texttt{PredEx} to provide precise predictions and meaningful explanations, establishing it as a valuable benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.
M3LEO: A Multi-Modal, Multi-Label Earth Observation Dataset Integrating Interferometric SAR and RGB Data
Allen, Matthew J, Dorr, Francisco, Mejia, Joseph Alejandro Gallego, Martínez-Ferrer, Laura, Jungbluth, Anna, Kalaitzis, Freddie, Ramos-Pollán, Raúl
Satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionised the way we address global challenges in a rapidly evolving world. Huge quantities of Earth Observation (EO) data are generated by satellite sensors daily, but processing these large datasets for use in ML pipelines is technically and computationally challenging. Specifically, different types of EO data are often hosted on a variety of platforms, with differing availability for Python preprocessing tools. In addition, spatial alignment across data sources and data tiling can present significant technical hurdles for novice users. While some preprocessed EO datasets exist, their content is often limited to optical or near-optical wavelength data, which is ineffective at night or in adverse weather conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensing technique based on microwave length radiation, offers a viable alternative. However, the application of machine learning to SAR has been limited due to a lack of ML-ready data and pipelines, particularly for the full diversity of SAR data, including polarimetry, coherence and interferometry. We introduce M3LEO, a multi-modal, multi-label EO dataset that includes polarimetric, interferometric, and coherence SAR data derived from Sentinel-1, alongside Sentinel-2 RGB imagery and a suite of labelled tasks for model evaluation. M3LEO spans 17.5TB and contains approximately 10M data chips across six geographic regions. The dataset is complemented by a flexible PyTorch Lightning framework, with configuration management using Hydra. We provide tools to process any dataset available on popular platforms such as Google Earth Engine for integration with our framework. Initial experiments validate the utility of our data and framework, showing that SAR imagery contains information additional to that extractable from RGB data. Data at huggingface.co/M3LEO, and code at github.com/spaceml-org/M3LEO.
Legal Documents Drafting with Fine-Tuned Pre-Trained Large Language Model
Lin, Chun-Hsien, Cheng, Pu-Jen
With the development of large-scale Language Models (LLM), fine-tuning pre-trained LLM has become a mainstream paradigm for solving downstream tasks of natural language processing. However, training a language model in the legal field requires a large number of legal documents so that the language model can learn legal terminology and the particularity of the format of legal documents. The typical NLP approaches usually rely on many manually annotated data sets for training. However, in the legal field application, it is difficult to obtain a large number of manually annotated data sets, which restricts the typical method applied to the task of drafting legal documents. The experimental results of this paper show that not only can we leverage a large number of annotation-free legal documents without Chinese word segmentation to fine-tune a large-scale language model, but more importantly, it can fine-tune a pre-trained LLM on the local computer to achieve the generating legal document drafts task, and at the same time achieve the protection of information privacy and to improve information security issues. NTRODUCTION In recent years, researchers have applied neural networks to natural language processing, achieving state-of-the-art performance in processing legal documents, such as tasks related to textual entailment [1] and legal question answering [2]. With the development of large-scale Language Models (LLM), fine-tuning pretrained LLM to address natural language processing tasks, as mentioned above, has become a mainstream paradigm [3]. However, challenges persist when employing natural language text generation techniques as a solution for highly specialized tasks like legal document drafting.
Measuring and Addressing Indexical Bias in Information Retrieval
Ziems, Caleb, Held, William, Dwivedi-Yu, Jane, Yang, Diyi
Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed to deliver relevant content, but traditional systems may not optimize rankings for fairness, neutrality, or the balance of ideas. Consequently, IR can often introduce indexical biases, or biases in the positional order of documents. Although indexical bias can demonstrably affect people's opinion, voting patterns, and other behaviors, these issues remain understudied as the field lacks reliable metrics and procedures for automatically measuring indexical bias. Towards this end, we introduce the PAIR framework, which supports automatic bias audits for ranked documents or entire IR systems. After introducing DUO, the first general-purpose automatic bias metric, we run an extensive evaluation of 8 IR systems on a new corpus of 32k synthetic and 4.7k natural documents, with 4k queries spanning 1.4k controversial issue topics. A human behavioral study validates our approach, showing that our bias metric can help predict when and how indexical bias will shift a reader's opinion.
LawGPT: A Chinese Legal Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Model
Zhou, Zhi, Shi, Jiang-Xin, Song, Peng-Xiao, Yang, Xiao-Wen, Jin, Yi-Xuan, Guo, Lan-Zhe, Li, Yu-Feng
Large language models (LLMs), including both proprietary and open-source models, have showcased remarkable capabilities in addressing a wide range of downstream tasks. Nonetheless, when it comes to practical Chinese legal tasks, these models fail to meet the actual requirements. Proprietary models do not ensure data privacy for sensitive legal cases, while open-source models demonstrate unsatisfactory performance due to their lack of legal knowledge. To address this problem, we introduce LawGPT, the first open-source model specifically designed for Chinese legal applications. LawGPT comprises two key components: legal-oriented pre-training and legal supervised fine-tuning. Specifically, we employ large-scale Chinese legal documents for legal-oriented pre-training to incorporate legal domain knowledge. To further improve the model's performance on downstream legal tasks, we create a knowledge-driven instruction dataset for legal supervised fine-tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that LawGPT outperforms the open-source LLaMA 7B model. Our code and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/pengxiao-song/LaWGPT and have received 5.7K stars on GitHub.
Creating an AI Observer: Generative Semantic Workspaces
Holur, Pavan, Rajesh, Shreyas, Chong, David, Roychowdhury, Vwani
An experienced human Observer reading a document -- such as a crime report -- creates a succinct plot-like $\textit{``Working Memory''}$ comprising different actors, their prototypical roles and states at any point, their evolution over time based on their interactions, and even a map of missing Semantic parts anticipating them in the future. $\textit{An equivalent AI Observer currently does not exist}$. We introduce the $\textbf{[G]}$enerative $\textbf{[S]}$emantic $\textbf{[W]}$orkspace (GSW) -- comprising an $\textit{``Operator''}$ and a $\textit{``Reconciler''}$ -- that leverages advancements in LLMs to create a generative-style Semantic framework, as opposed to a traditionally predefined set of lexicon labels. Given a text segment $C_n$ that describes an ongoing situation, the $\textit{Operator}$ instantiates actor-centric Semantic maps (termed ``Workspace instance'' $\mathcal{W}_n$). The $\textit{Reconciler}$ resolves differences between $\mathcal{W}_n$ and a ``Working memory'' $\mathcal{M}_n^*$ to generate the updated $\mathcal{M}_{n+1}^*$. GSW outperforms well-known baselines on several tasks ($\sim 94\%$ vs. FST, GLEN, BertSRL - multi-sentence Semantics extraction, $\sim 15\%$ vs. NLI-BERT, $\sim 35\%$ vs. QA). By mirroring the real Observer, GSW provides the first step towards Spatial Computing assistants capable of understanding individual intentions and predicting future behavior.
Which Side Are You On? A Multi-task Dataset for End-to-End Argument Summarisation and Evaluation
Li, Hao, Wu, Yuping, Schlegel, Viktor, Batista-Navarro, Riza, Madusanka, Tharindu, Zahid, Iqra, Zeng, Jiayan, Wang, Xiaochi, He, Xinran, Li, Yizhi, Nenadic, Goran
With the recent advances of large language models (LLMs), it is no longer infeasible to build an automated debate system that helps people to synthesise persuasive arguments. Previous work attempted this task by integrating multiple components. In our work, we introduce an argument mining dataset that captures the end-to-end process of preparing an argumentative essay for a debate, which covers the tasks of claim and evidence identification (Task 1 ED), evidence convincingness ranking (Task 2 ECR), argumentative essay summarisation and human preference ranking (Task 3 ASR) and metric learning for automated evaluation of resulting essays, based on human feedback along argument quality dimensions (Task 4 SQE). Our dataset contains 14k examples of claims that are fully annotated with the various properties supporting the aforementioned tasks. We evaluate multiple generative baselines for each of these tasks, including representative LLMs. We find, that while they show promising results on individual tasks in our benchmark, their end-to-end performance on all four tasks in succession deteriorates significantly, both in automated measures as well as in human-centred evaluation. This challenge presented by our proposed dataset motivates future research on end-to-end argument mining and summarisation. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/HarrywillDr/ArgSum-Datatset
PaCE: Parsimonious Concept Engineering for Large Language Models
Luo, Jinqi, Ding, Tianjiao, Chan, Kwan Ho Ryan, Thaker, Darshan, Chattopadhyay, Aditya, Callison-Burch, Chris, Vidal, René
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used for a wide variety of tasks. While they are capable of generating human-like responses, they can also produce undesirable output including potentially harmful information, racist or sexist language, and hallucinations. Alignment methods are designed to reduce such undesirable output, via techniques such as fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and representation engineering. However, existing methods face several challenges: some require costly fine-tuning for every alignment task; some do not adequately remove undesirable concepts, failing alignment; some remove benign concepts, lowering the linguistic capabilities of LLMs. To address these issues, we propose Parsimonious Concept Engineering (PaCE), a novel activation engineering framework for alignment. First, to sufficiently model the concepts, we construct a large-scale concept dictionary in the activation space, in which each atom corresponds to a semantic concept. Then, given any alignment task, we instruct a concept partitioner to efficiently annotate the concepts as benign or undesirable. Finally, at inference time, we decompose the LLM activations along the concept dictionary via sparse coding, to accurately represent the activation as a linear combination of the benign and undesirable components. By removing the latter ones from the activation, we reorient the behavior of LLMs towards alignment goals. We conduct experiments on tasks such as response detoxification, faithfulness enhancement, and sentiment revising, and show that PaCE achieves state-of-the-art alignment performance while maintaining linguistic capabilities.
Exploring and steering the moral compass of Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become central to advancing automation and decision-making across various sectors, raising significant ethical questions. This study proposes a comprehensive comparative analysis of the most advanced LLMs to assess their moral profiles. We subjected several state-of-the-art models to a selection of ethical dilemmas and found that all the proprietary ones are mostly utilitarian and all of the open-weights ones align mostly with values-based ethics. Furthermore, when using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, all models we probed - except for Llama 2-7B - displayed a strong liberal bias. Lastly, in order to causally intervene in one of the studied models, we propose a novel similarity-specific activation steering technique. Using this method, we were able to reliably steer the model's moral compass to different ethical schools. All of these results showcase that there is an ethical dimension in already deployed LLMs, an aspect that is generally overlooked.