Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM may be unreliable. Depending on whether an answer is trustworthy, a system can then choose to route the question to another expert, or otherwise fall back on a safe default behavior. In this work, we study the extent to which LLMs can reliably indicate confidence in their answers, and how this notion of confidence can translate into downstream accuracy gains. We propose Self-REF, a lightweight training strategy to teach LLMs to express confidence in whether their answers are correct in a reliable manner. Self-REF introduces confidence tokens into the LLM, from which a confidence score can be extracted. Compared to conventional approaches such as verbalizing confidence and examining token probabilities, we demonstrate empirically that confidence tokens show significant improvements in downstream routing and rejection learning tasks.

As relevant examples such as the future criminal detection software [1] show, fairness of AI-based and social domain affecting decision support tools constitutes an important area of research. In this contribution, we investigate the applications of AI to socioeconomically relevant infrastructures such as those of water distribution networks (WDNs), where fairness issues have yet to gain a foothold. To establish the notion of fairness in this domain, we propose an appropriate definition of protected groups and group fairness in WDNs as an extension of existing definitions. We demonstrate that typical methods for the detection of leakages in WDNs are unfair in this sense. Further, we thus propose a remedy to increase the fairness which can be applied even to non-differentiable ensemble classification methods as used in this context.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in a variety of important applications, yet their safety and reliability remain as major concerns. Various adversarial and jailbreak attacks have been proposed to bypass the safety alignment and cause the model to produce harmful responses. We introduce Self-supervised Prompt INjection (SPIN) which can detect and reverse these various attacks on LLMs. As our self-supervised prompt defense is done at inference-time, it is also compatible with existing alignment and adds an additional layer of safety for defense. Our benchmarks demonstrate that our system can reduce the attack success rate by up to 87.9%, while maintaining the performance on benign user requests. In addition, we discuss the situation of an adaptive attacker and show that our method is still resilient against attackers who are aware of our defense.

Statistical watermarking techniques are well-established for sequentially decoded language models (LMs). However, these techniques cannot be directly applied to order-agnostic LMs, as the tokens in order-agnostic LMs are not generated sequentially. In this work, we introduce Pattern-mark, a pattern-based watermarking framework specifically designed for order-agnostic LMs. We develop a Markov-chain-based watermark generator that produces watermark key sequences with high-frequency key patterns. Correspondingly, we propose a statistical pattern-based detection algorithm that recovers the key sequence during detection and conducts statistical tests based on the count of high-frequency patterns. Our extensive evaluations on order-agnostic LMs, such as ProteinMPNN and CMLM, demonstrate Pattern-mark's enhanced detection efficiency, generation quality, and robustness, positioning it as a superior watermarking technique for order-agnostic LMs.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a vital computational method for addressing language processing, analysis, and generation. NLP tasks form the core of many daily applications, from automatic text correction to speech recognition. While significant research has focused on NLP tasks for the English language, less attention has been given to Modern Standard Arabic and Dialectal Arabic. Globalization has also contributed to the rise of Code-Switching (CS), where speakers mix languages within conversations and even within individual words (intra-word CS). This is especially common in Arab countries, where people often switch between dialects or between dialects and a foreign language they master. CS between Arabic and English is frequent in Egypt, especially on social media. Consequently, a significant amount of code-switched content can be found online. Such code-switched data needs to be investigated and analyzed for several NLP tasks to tackle the challenges of this multilingual phenomenon and Arabic language challenges. No work has been done before for several integral NLP tasks on Arabic-English CS data. In this work, we focus on the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task and other tasks that help propose a solution for the NER task on CS data, e.g., Language Identification. This work addresses this gap by proposing and applying state-of-the-art techniques for Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic-English NER. We have created the first annotated CS Arabic-English corpus for the NER task. Also, we apply two enhancement techniques to improve the NER tagger on CS data using CS contextual embeddings and data augmentation techniques. All methods showed improvements in the performance of the NER taggers on CS data. Finally, we propose several intra-word language identification approaches to determine the language type of a mixed text and identify whether it is a named entity or not.

Spatiotemporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) have shown promising results in many domains, from forecasting to epidemiology. However, understanding the dynamics learned by these models and explaining their behaviour is significantly more complex than for models dealing with static data. Inspired by Koopman theory, which allows a simpler description of intricate, nonlinear dynamical systems, we introduce an explainability approach for temporal graphs. We present two methods to interpret the STGNN's decision process and identify the most relevant spatial and temporal patterns in the input for the task at hand. The first relies on dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), a Koopman-inspired dimensionality reduction method. The second relies on sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy), a popular method for discovering governing equations, which we use for the first time as a general tool for explainability. We show how our methods can correctly identify interpretable features such as infection times and infected nodes in the context of dissemination processes.

Watermarking techniques offer a promising way to identify machine-generated content via embedding covert information into the contents generated from language models (LMs). However, the robustness of the watermarking schemes has not been well explored. In this paper, we present De-mark, an advanced framework designed to remove n-gram-based watermarks effectively. Our method utilizes a novel querying strategy, termed random selection probing, which aids in assessing the strength of the watermark and identifying the red-green list within the n-gram watermark. Experiments on popular LMs, such as Llama3 and ChatGPT, demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of De-mark in watermark removal and exploitation tasks.

We present Movie Gen, a cast of foundation models that generates high-quality, 1080p HD videos with different aspect ratios and synchronized audio. We also show additional capabilities such as precise instruction-based video editing and generation of personalized videos based on a user's image. Our models set a new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks: text-to-video synthesis, video personalization, video editing, video-to-audio generation, and text-to-audio generation. Our largest video generation model is a 30B parameter transformer trained with a maximum context length of 73K video tokens, corresponding to a generated video of 16 seconds at 16 frames-per-second. We show multiple technical innovations and simplifications on the architecture, latent spaces, training objectives and recipes, data curation, evaluation protocols, parallelization techniques, and inference optimizations that allow us to reap the benefits of scaling pre-training data, model size, and training compute for training large scale media generation models. We hope this paper helps the research community to accelerate progress and innovation in media generation models. All videos from this paper are available at https://go.fb.me/MovieGenResearchVideos.

Ensembles of Deep Neural Networks, Deep Ensembles, are widely used as a simple way to boost predictive performance. However, their impact on algorithmic fairness is not well understood yet. Algorithmic fairness investigates how a model's performance varies across different groups, typically defined by protected attributes such as age, gender, or race. In this work, we investigate the interplay between the performance gains from Deep Ensembles and fairness. Our analysis reveals that they unevenly favor different groups in what we refer to as a disparate benefits effect. We empirically investigate this effect with Deep Ensembles applied to popular facial analysis and medical imaging datasets, where protected group attributes are given and find that it occurs for multiple established group fairness metrics, including statistical parity and equal opportunity. Furthermore, we identify the per-group difference in predictive diversity of ensemble members as the potential cause of the disparate benefits effect. Finally, we evaluate different approaches to reduce unfairness due to the disparate benefits effect. Our findings show that post-processing is an effective method to mitigate this unfairness while preserving the improved performance of Deep Ensembles.

We introduce a novel framework for human-AI collaboration in prediction and decision tasks. Our approach leverages human judgment to distinguish inputs which are algorithmically indistinguishable, or "look the same" to any feasible predictive algorithm. We argue that this framing clarifies the problem of human-AI collaboration in prediction and decision tasks, as experts often form judgments by drawing on information which is not encoded in an algorithm's training data. Algorithmic indistinguishability yields a natural test for assessing whether experts incorporate this kind of "side information", and further provides a simple but principled method for selectively incorporating human feedback into algorithmic predictions. We show that this method provably improves the performance of any feasible algorithmic predictor and precisely quantify this improvement. We demonstrate the utility of our framework in a case study of emergency room triage decisions, where we find that although algorithmic risk scores are highly competitive with physicians, there is strong evidence that physician judgments provide signal which could not be replicated by any predictive algorithm. This insight yields a range of natural decision rules which leverage the complementary strengths of human experts and predictive algorithms.