Cultural variation exists between nations (e.g., the United States vs. China), but also within regions (e.g., California vs. Texas, Los Angeles vs. San Francisco). Measuring this regional cultural variation can illuminate how and why people think and behave differently. Historically, it has been difficult to computationally model cultural variation due to a lack of training data and scalability constraints. In this work, we introduce a new research problem for the NLP community: How do we measure variation in cultural constructs across regions using language? We then provide a scalable solution: building knowledge-guided lexica to model cultural variation, encouraging future work at the intersection of NLP and cultural understanding. We also highlight modern LLMs' failure to measure cultural variation or generate culturally varied language.

This paper introduces AutoSurvey, a speedy and well-organized methodology for automating the creation of comprehensive literature surveys in rapidly evolving fields like artificial intelligence. Traditional survey paper creation faces challenges due to the vast volume and complexity of information, prompting the need for efficient survey methods. While large language models (LLMs) offer promise in automating this process, challenges such as context window limitations, parametric knowledge constraints, and the lack of evaluation benchmarks remain. AutoSurvey addresses these challenges through a systematic approach that involves initial retrieval and outline generation, subsection drafting by specialized LLMs, integration and refinement, and rigorous evaluation and iteration. Our contributions include a comprehensive solution to the survey problem, a reliable evaluation method, and experimental validation demonstrating AutoSurvey's effectiveness.

In the context of text classification, the financial burden of annotation exercises for creating training data is a critical issue. Active learning techniques, particularly those rooted in uncertainty sampling, offer a cost-effective solution by pinpointing the most instructive samples for manual annotation. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 provide an alternative for automated annotation but come with concerns regarding their reliability. This study introduces a novel methodology that integrates human annotators and LLMs within an Active Learning framework. We conducted evaluations on three public datasets. IMDB for sentiment analysis, a Fake News dataset for authenticity discernment, and a Movie Genres dataset for multi-label classification.The proposed framework integrates human annotation with the output of LLMs, depending on the model uncertainty levels. This strategy achieves an optimal balance between cost efficiency and classification performance. The empirical results show a substantial decrease in the costs associated with data annotation while either maintaining or improving model accuracy.

The spread of fake news negatively impacts individuals and is regarded as a significant social challenge that needs to be addressed. A number of algorithmic and insightful features have been identified for detecting fake news. However, with the recent LLMs and their advanced generation capabilities, many of the detectable features (e.g., style-conversion attacks) can be altered, making it more challenging to distinguish from real news. This study proposes adversarial style augmentation, AdStyle, to train a fake news detector that remains robust against various style-conversion attacks. Our model's key mechanism is the careful use of LLMs to automatically generate a diverse yet coherent range of style-conversion attack prompts. This improves the generation of prompts that are particularly difficult for the detector to handle. Experiments show that our augmentation strategy improves robustness and detection performance when tested on fake news benchmark datasets.

Entity matching (EM), the task of identifying whether two descriptions refer to the same entity, is essential in data management. Traditional methods have evolved from rule-based to AI-driven approaches, yet current techniques using large language models (LLMs) often fall short due to their reliance on static knowledge and rigid, predefined prompts. In this paper, we introduce Libem, a compound AI system designed to address these limitations by incorporating a flexible, tool-oriented approach. Libem supports entity matching through dynamic tool use, self-refinement, and optimization, allowing it to adapt and refine its process based on the dataset and performance metrics. Unlike traditional solo-AI EM systems, which often suffer from a lack of modularity that hinders iterative design improvements and system optimization, Libem offers a composable and reusable toolchain. This approach aims to contribute to ongoing discussions and developments in AI-driven data management.

A key goal in mechanistic interpretability is circuit analysis: finding sparse subgraphs of models corresponding to specific behaviors or capabilities. However, MLP sublayers make fine-grained circuit analysis on transformer-based language models difficult. In particular, interpretable features -- such as those found by sparse autoencoders (SAEs) -- are typically linear combinations of extremely many neurons, each with its own nonlinearity to account for. Circuit analysis in this setting thus either yields intractably large circuits or fails to disentangle local and global behavior. To address this we explore transcoders, which seek to faithfully approximate a densely activating MLP layer with a wider, sparsely-activating MLP layer. We successfully train transcoders on language models with 120M, 410M, and 1.4B parameters, and find them to perform at least on par with SAEs in terms of sparsity, faithfulness, and human-interpretability. We then introduce a novel method for using transcoders to perform weights-based circuit analysis through MLP sublayers. The resulting circuits neatly factorize into input-dependent and input-invariant terms. Finally, we apply transcoders to reverse-engineer unknown circuits in the model, and we obtain novel insights regarding the greater-than circuit in GPT2-small. Our results suggest that transcoders can prove effective in decomposing model computations involving MLPs into interpretable circuits. Code is available at https://github.com/jacobdunefsky/transcoder_circuits.

Existing research on large language models (LLMs) shows that they can solve information extraction tasks through multi-step planning. However, their extraction behavior on complex sentences and tasks is unstable, emerging issues such as false positives and missing elements. We observe that decomposing complex extraction tasks and extracting them step by step can effectively improve LLMs' performance, and the extraction orders of entities significantly affect the final results of LLMs. This paper proposes a two-stage multi-step method for LLM-based information extraction and adopts the RL framework to execute the multi-step planning. We regard sequential extraction as a Markov decision process, build an LLM-based extraction environment, design a decision module to adaptively provide the optimal order for sequential entity extraction on different sentences, and utilize the DDQN algorithm to train the decision model. We also design the rewards and evaluation metrics suitable for the extraction results of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving the information extraction capabilities of LLMs.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are powerful models; however they can exhibit unwanted biases, making them less safe when deployed directly in applications such as text-to-image, text-to-video retrievals, reverse search, or classification tasks. In this work, we propose a novel framework to generate synthetic counterfactual images to create a diverse and balanced dataset that can be used to fine-tune CLIP. Given a set of diverse synthetic base images from text-to-image models, we leverage off-the-shelf segmentation and inpainting models to place humans with diverse visual appearances in context. We show that CLIP trained on such datasets learns to disentangle the human appearance from the context of an image, i.e., what makes a doctor is not correlated to the person's visual appearance, like skin color or body type, but to the context, such as background, the attire they are wearing, or the objects they are holding. We demonstrate that our fine-tuned CLIP model, $CF_\alpha$, improves key fairness metrics such as MaxSkew, MinSkew, and NDKL by 40-66\% for image retrieval tasks, while still achieving similar levels of performance in downstream tasks. We show that, by design, our model retains maximal compatibility with the original CLIP models, and can be easily controlled to support different accuracy versus fairness trade-offs in a plug-n-play fashion.

Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) reflect diverse user values and preferences is crucial as their user bases expand globally. It is therefore encouraging to see the growing interest in LLM personalization within the research community. However, current works often rely on the LLM-as-a-Judge approach for evaluation without thoroughly examining its validity. In this paper, we investigate the reliability of LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge, asking LLMs to judge user preferences based on personas. Our findings suggest that directly applying LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge is less reliable than previously assumed, showing low and inconsistent agreement with human ground truth. The personas typically used are often overly simplistic, resulting in low predictive power. To address these issues, we introduce verbal uncertainty estimation into the LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge pipeline, allowing the model to express low confidence on uncertain judgments. This adjustment leads to much higher agreement (above 80%) on high-certainty samples for binary tasks. Through human evaluation, we find that the LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge achieves comparable performance to third-party humans evaluation and even surpasses human performance on high-certainty samples. Our work indicates that certainty-enhanced LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge offers a promising direction for developing more reliable and scalable methods for evaluating LLM personalization.

Social science research has shown that candidates with names indicative of certain races or genders often face discrimination in employment practices. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated racial and gender biases in various applications. In this study, we utilize GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama 3-70B-Instruct to simulate hiring decisions and salary recommendations for candidates with 320 first names that strongly signal their race and gender, across over 750,000 prompts. Our empirical results indicate a preference among these models for hiring candidates with White female-sounding names over other demographic groups across 40 occupations. Additionally, even among candidates with identical qualifications, salary recommendations vary by as much as 5% between different subgroups. A comparison with real-world labor data reveals inconsistent alignment with U.S. labor market characteristics, underscoring the necessity of risk investigation of LLM-powered systems.