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Learning from Litigation: Graphs and LLMs for Retrieval and Reasoning in eDiscovery

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) involves identifying relevant documents from a vast collection based on legal production requests. The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) has transformed this process, helping document review and enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Although traditional approaches like BM25 or fine-tuned pre-trained models are common in eDiscovery, they face performance, computational, and interpretability challenges. In contrast, Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods prioritize interpretability but sacrifice performance and throughput. This paper introduces DISCOvery Graph (DISCOG), a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of two worlds: a heterogeneous graph-based method for accurate document relevance prediction and subsequent LLM-driven approach for reasoning. Graph representational learning generates embeddings and predicts links, ranking the corpus for a given request, and the LLMs provide reasoning for document relevance. Our approach handles datasets with balanced and imbalanced distributions, outperforming baselines in F1-score, precision, and recall by an average of 12%, 3%, and 16%, respectively. In an enterprise context, our approach drastically reduces document review costs by 99.9% compared to manual processes and by 95% compared to LLM-based classification methods


Content-Agnostic Moderation for Stance-Neutral Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Personalized recommendation systems often drive users towards more extreme content, exacerbating opinion polarization. While (content-aware) moderation has been proposed to mitigate these effects, such approaches risk curtailing the freedom of speech and of information. To address this concern, we propose and explore the feasibility of \emph{content-agnostic} moderation as an alternative approach for reducing polarization. Content-agnostic moderation does not rely on the actual content being moderated, arguably making it less prone to forms of censorship. We establish theoretically that content-agnostic moderation cannot be guaranteed to work in a fully generic setting. However, we show that it can often be effectively achieved in practice with plausible assumptions. We introduce two novel content-agnostic moderation methods that modify the recommendations from the content recommender to disperse user-item co-clusters without relying on content features. To evaluate the potential of content-agnostic moderation in controlled experiments, we built a simulation environment to analyze the closed-loop behavior of a system with a given set of users, recommendation system, and moderation approach. Through comprehensive experiments in this environment, we show that our proposed moderation methods significantly enhance stance neutrality and maintain high recommendation quality across various data scenarios. Our results indicate that achieving stance neutrality without direct content information is not only feasible but can also help in developing more balanced and informative recommendation systems without substantially degrading user engagement.


Participation in the age of foundation models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Growing interest and investment in the capabilities of foundation models has positioned such systems to impact a wide array of public services. Alongside these opportunities is the risk that these systems reify existing power imbalances and cause disproportionate harm to marginalized communities. Participatory approaches hold promise to instead lend agency and decision-making power to marginalized stakeholders. But existing approaches in participatory AI/ML are typically deeply grounded in context - how do we apply these approaches to foundation models, which are, by design, disconnected from context? Our paper interrogates this question. First, we examine existing attempts at incorporating participation into foundation models. We highlight the tension between participation and scale, demonstrating that it is intractable for impacted communities to meaningfully shape a foundation model that is intended to be universally applicable. In response, we develop a blueprint for participatory foundation models that identifies more local, application-oriented opportunities for meaningful participation. In addition to the "foundation" layer, our framework proposes the "subfloor'' layer, in which stakeholders develop shared technical infrastructure, norms and governance for a grounded domain, and the "surface'' layer, in which affected communities shape the use of a foundation model for a specific downstream task. The intermediate "subfloor'' layer scopes the range of potential harms to consider, and affords communities more concrete avenues for deliberation and intervention. At the same time, it avoids duplicative effort by scaling input across relevant use cases. Through three case studies in clinical care, financial services, and journalism, we illustrate how this multi-layer model can create more meaningful opportunities for participation than solely intervening at the foundation layer.


One-Shot Safety Alignment for Large Language Models via Optimal Dualization

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The growing safety concerns surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align them with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their helpfulness and safety. A promising approach is to enforce safety constraints through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). For such constrained RLHF, common Lagrangian-based primal-dual policy optimization methods are computationally expensive and often unstable. This paper presents a dualization perspective that reduces constrained alignment to an equivalent unconstrained alignment problem. We do so by pre-optimizing a smooth and convex dual function that has a closed form. This shortcut eliminates the need for cumbersome primal-dual policy iterations, thus greatly reducing the computational burden and improving training stability. Our strategy leads to two practical algorithms in model-based and preference-based scenarios (MoCAN and PeCAN, respectively). A broad range of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.


Can you bequeath your Steam account? Maybe, but there's a catch

PCWorld

We've all got to die sometime. But whatever you think awaits us after death, it's unlikely to involve a suped-up gaming PC, a fiber connection, and tons of digital video games. Last week, a Steam support representative said that in addition to not being able to transfer your account to another person, you also can't leave it to your beneficiaries. But this policy against the inheriting of PC games might be in violation of a relatively recent United States law. A ResetEra poster named delete12345 asked a Steam support representative if they could transfer the ownership of their Steam account after they died through their will.


The media bosses fighting back against AI -- and the ones cutting deals

Washington Post - Technology News

A little more than a year ago, Barry Diller rallied his fellow media titans to fight artificial intelligence's march on the publishing business. The time had come, he said, to "absolutely instigate litigation" against the tech companies trying to "scrape our content" and "cannibalize everything."


ChatGPT as the Marketplace of Ideas: Should Truth-Seeking Be the Goal of AI Content Governance?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As one of the most enduring metaphors within legal discourse, the marketplace of ideas has wielded considerable influence over the jurisprudential landscape for decades. A century after the inception of this theory, ChatGPT emerged as a revolutionary technological advancement in the twenty-first century. This research finds that ChatGPT effectively manifests the marketplace metaphor. It not only instantiates the promises envisaged by generations of legal scholars but also lays bare the perils discerned through sustained academic critique. Specifically, the workings of ChatGPT and the marketplace of ideas theory exhibit at least four common features: arena, means, objectives, and flaws. These shared attributes are sufficient to render ChatGPT historically the most qualified engine for actualizing the marketplace of ideas theory. The comparison of the marketplace theory and ChatGPT merely marks a starting point. A more meaningful undertaking entails reevaluating and reframing both internal and external AI policies by referring to the accumulated experience, insights, and suggestions researchers have raised to fix the marketplace theory. Here, a pivotal issue is: should truth-seeking be set as the goal of AI content governance? Given the unattainability of the absolute truth-seeking goal, I argue against adopting zero-risk policies. Instead, a more judicious approach would be to embrace a knowledge-based alternative wherein large language models (LLMs) are trained to generate competing and divergent viewpoints based on sufficient justifications. This research also argues that so-called AI content risks are not created by AI companies but are inherent in the entire information ecosystem. Thus, the burden of managing these risks should be distributed among different social actors, rather than being solely shouldered by chatbot companies.


The Cost of Arbitrariness for Individuals: Examining the Legal and Technical Challenges of Model Multiplicity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Model multiplicity, the phenomenon where multiple models achieve similar performance despite different underlying learned functions, introduces arbitrariness in model selection. While this arbitrariness may seem inconsequential in expectation, its impact on individuals can be severe. This paper explores various individual concerns stemming from multiplicity, including the effects of arbitrariness beyond final predictions, disparate arbitrariness for individuals belonging to protected groups, and the challenges associated with the arbitrariness of a single algorithmic system creating a monopoly across various contexts. It provides both an empirical examination of these concerns and a comprehensive analysis from the legal standpoint, addressing how these issues are perceived in the anti-discrimination law in Canada. We conclude the discussion with technical challenges in the current landscape of model multiplicity to meet legal requirements and the legal gap between current law and the implications of arbitrariness in model selection, highlighting relevant future research directions for both disciplines.


Decoding moral judgement from text: a pilot study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Moral judgement is a complex human reaction that engages cognitive and emotional dimensions. While some of the morality neural correlates are known, it is currently unclear if we can detect moral violation at a single-trial level. In a pilot study, here we explore the feasibility of moral judgement decoding from text stimuli with passive brain-computer interfaces. For effective moral judgement elicitation, we use video-audio affective priming prior to text stimuli presentation and attribute the text to moral agents. Our results show that further efforts are necessary to achieve reliable classification between moral congruency vs. incongruency states. We obtain good accuracy results for neutral vs. morally-charged trials. With this research, we try to pave the way towards neuroadaptive human-computer interaction and more human-compatible large language models (LLMs)


More Than Catastrophic Forgetting: Integrating General Capabilities For Domain-Specific LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The performance on general tasks decreases after Large Language Models (LLMs) are fine-tuned on domain-specific tasks, the phenomenon is known as Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). However, this paper presents a further challenge for real application of domain-specific LLMs beyond CF, called General Capabilities Integration (GCI), which necessitates the integration of both the general capabilities and domain knowledge within a single instance. The objective of GCI is not merely to retain previously acquired general capabilities alongside new domain knowledge, but to harmonize and utilize both sets of skills in a cohesive manner to enhance performance on domain-specific tasks. Taking legal domain as an example, we carefully design three groups of training and testing tasks without lacking practicability, and construct the corresponding datasets. To better incorporate general capabilities across domain-specific scenarios, we introduce ALoRA, which utilizes a multi-head attention module upon LoRA, facilitating direct information transfer from preceding tokens to the current one. This enhancement permits the representation to dynamically switch between domain-specific knowledge and general competencies according to the attention. Extensive experiments are conducted on the proposed tasks. The results exhibit the significance of our setting, and the effectiveness of our method.