The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the implementation and acceptance of remotely proctored high-stake assessments. While the flexible administration of the tests brings forth many values, it raises test security-related concerns. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed tremendous advances in the last five years. Many AI tools (such as the very recent ChatGPT) can generate high-quality responses to test items. These new developments require test security research beyond the statistical analysis of scores and response time. Data analytics and AI methods based on clickstream process data can get us deeper insight into the test-taking process and hold great promise for securing remotely administered high-stakes tests. This chapter uses real-world examples to show that this is indeed the case.

Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) aims to extract aspect terms and their corresponding sentiment polarities from multimodal information, including text and images. While traditional supervised learning methods have shown effectiveness in this task, the adaptability of large language models (LLMs) to MABSA remains uncertain. Recent advances in LLMs, such as Llama2, LLaVA, and ChatGPT, demonstrate strong capabilities in general tasks, yet their performance in complex and fine-grained scenarios like MABSA is underexplored. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the suitability of LLMs for MABSA. To this end, we construct a benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on MABSA tasks and compare them with state-of-the-art supervised learning methods. Our experiments reveal that, while LLMs demonstrate potential in multimodal understanding, they face significant challenges in achieving satisfactory results for MABSA, particularly in terms of accuracy and inference time. Based on these findings, we discuss the limitations of current LLMs and outline directions for future research to enhance their capabilities in multimodal sentiment analysis.

We propose PPLqa, an easy to compute, language independent, information-theoretic metric to measure the quality of responses of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) in an unsupervised way, without requiring ground truth annotations or human supervision. The method and metric enables users to rank generative language models for quality of responses, so as to make a selection of the best model for a given task. Our single metric assesses LLMs with an approach that subsumes, but is not explicitly based on, coherence and fluency (quality of writing) and relevance and consistency (appropriateness of response) to the query. PPLqa performs as well as other related metrics, and works better with long-form Q\&A. Thus, PPLqa enables bypassing the lengthy annotation process required for ground truth evaluations, and it also correlates well with human and LLM rankings.

Task-aware robotic grasping is a challenging problem that requires the integration of semantic understanding and geometric reasoning. Traditional grasp planning approaches focus on stable or feasible grasps, often disregarding the specific tasks the robot needs to accomplish. This paper proposes a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms to enable zero-shot task-conditioned grasp selection. The framework segments objects into meaningful subparts and labels each subpart semantically, creating structured representations that can be used to prompt an LLM. By coupling semantic and geometric representations of an object's structure, the LLM's knowledge about tasks and which parts to grasp can be applied in the physical world. The QD-generated grasp archive provides a diverse set of grasps, allowing us to select the most suitable grasp based on the task. We evaluate the proposed method on a subset of the YCB dataset, where a Franka Emika robot is assigned to perform various actions based on object-specific task requirements. We created a ground truth by conducting a survey with six participants to determine the best grasp region for each task-object combination according to human intuition. The model was evaluated on 12 different objects across 4--7 object-specific tasks, achieving a weighted intersection over union (IoU) of 76.4% when compared to the survey data.

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike the existing methods, our proposed approach eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed methodology to the settings, in which the treatment feature is based on human perception rather than is assumed to be fixed given the treatment object. The proposed methodology is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate the existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over the state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.

The increasing capabilities of large generative models and their ever more widespread deployment have raised concerns about their reliability, safety, and potential misuse. To address these issues, recent works have proposed to control model generation by steering model activations in order to effectively induce or prevent the emergence of concepts or behaviors in the generated output. In this paper we introduce Activation Transport (AcT), a general framework to steer activations guided by optimal transport theory that generalizes many previous activation-steering works. AcT is modality-agnostic and provides fine-grained control over the model behavior with negligible computational overhead, while minimally impacting model abilities. We experimentally show the effectiveness and versatility of our approach by addressing key challenges in large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image diffusion models (T2Is). For LLMs, we show that AcT can effectively mitigate toxicity, induce arbitrary concepts, and increase their truthfulness. In T2Is, we show how AcT enables fine-grained style control and concept negation.

Large language models have emerged as powerful tools for general intelligence, showcasing advanced natural language processing capabilities that find applications across diverse domains. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have highlighted the potential for significant enhancements in LLMs' task-specific performance through fine-tuning strategies like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and Quantized Low-Rank Adapters (Q-LoRA) method. However, previous works have shown that while fine-tuning offers significant performance gains, it also leads to challenges such as catastrophic forgetting and privacy and safety risks. To this end, there has been little to no work in \textit{understanding the impact of fine-tuning on the reasoning capabilities of LLMs}. Our research investigates the effect of fine-tuning on the reasoning abilities of LLMs, addressing critical questions regarding the impact of task-specific fine-tuning on overall reasoning capabilities, the influence of fine-tuning on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning performance, and the implications for the faithfulness of CoT reasonings. By exploring these dimensions, our study shows the impact of fine-tuning on LLM reasoning capabilities, where the faithfulness of CoT reasoning, on average across four datasets, decreases, highlighting potential shifts in internal mechanisms of the LLMs resulting from fine-tuning processes.

With the recent development of natural language generation models - termed as large language models (LLMs) - a potential use case has opened up to improve the way that humans interact with robot assistants. These LLMs should be able to leverage their large breadth of understanding to interpret natural language commands into effective, task appropriate and safe robot task executions. However, in reality, these models suffer from hallucinations, which may cause safety issues or deviations from the task. In other domains, these issues have been improved through the use of collaborative AI systems where multiple LLM agents can work together to collectively plan, code and self-check outputs. In this research, multiple collaborative AI systems were tested against a single independent AI agent to determine whether the success in other domains would translate into improved human-robot interaction performance. The results show that there is no defined trend between the number of agents and the success of the model. However, it is clear that some collaborative AI agent architectures can exhibit a greatly improved capacity to produce error-free code and to solve abstract problems.

Large-scale multimodal representation learning successfully optimizes for zero-shot transfer at test time. Yet the standard pretraining paradigm (contrastive learning on large amounts of image-text data) does not explicitly encourage representations to support few-shot adaptation. In this work, we propose a simple, but carefully designed extension to multimodal pretraining which enables representations to accommodate additional context. Using this objective, we show that vision-language models can be trained to exhibit significantly increased few-shot adaptation: across 21 downstream tasks, we find up to four-fold improvements in test-time sample efficiency, and average few-shot adaptation gains of over 5%, while retaining zero-shot generalization performance across model scales and training durations. In particular, equipped with simple, training-free, metric-based adaptation mechanisms, our representations easily surpass more complex and expensive optimization-based schemes, vastly simplifying generalization to new domains.

Functional safety forms an important aspect in the design of systems. Its emphasis on the automotive industry has evolved significantly over the years. Till date many methods have been developed to get appropriate FTA(Fault Tree analysis) for various scenarios and features pertaining to Autonomous Driving. This paper is an attempt to explore the scope of using Generative Artificial Intelligence(GenAI) in order to develop Fault Tree Analysis(FTA) with the use case of malfunction for the Lidar sensor in mind. We explore various available open source Large Language Models(LLM) models and then dive deep into one of them to study its responses and provide our analysis. This paper successfully shows the possibility to train existing Large Language models through Prompt Engineering for fault tree analysis for any Autonomy usecase aided with PlantUML tool.