Fairness has emerged as a critical consideration in the landscape of machine learning algorithms, particularly as AI continues to transform decision-making across societal domains. To ensure that these algorithms are free from bias and do not discriminate against individuals based on sensitive attributes such as gender and race, the field of algorithmic bias has introduced various fairness concepts, along with methodologies to achieve these notions in different contexts. Despite the rapid advancement, not all sectors have embraced these fairness principles to the same extent. One specific sector that merits attention in this regard is insurance. Within the realm of insurance pricing, fairness is defined through a distinct and specialized framework. Consequently, achieving fairness according to established notions does not automatically ensure fair pricing in insurance. In particular, regulators are increasingly emphasizing transparency in pricing algorithms and imposing constraints on insurance companies on the collection and utilization of sensitive consumer attributes. These factors present additional challenges in the implementation of fairness in pricing algorithms. To address these complexities and comply with regulatory demands, we propose an efficient method for constructing fair models that are tailored to the insurance domain, using only privatized sensitive attributes. Notably, our approach ensures statistical guarantees, does not require direct access to sensitive attributes, and adapts to varying transparency requirements, addressing regulatory demands while ensuring fairness in insurance pricing.

Unified Sequence Labeling that articulates different sequence labeling problems such as Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Semantic Role Labeling, etc. in a generalized sequence-to-sequence format opens up the opportunity to make the maximum utilization of large language model knowledge toward structured prediction. Unfortunately, this requires formatting them into specialized augmented format unknown to the base pretrained language model (PLMs) necessitating finetuning to the target format. This significantly bounds its usefulness in data-limited settings where finetuning large models cannot properly generalize to the target format. To address this challenge and leverage PLM knowledge effectively, we propose FISH-DIP, a sample-aware dynamic sparse finetuning strategy that selectively focuses on a fraction of parameters, informed by feedback from highly regressing examples, during the fine-tuning process. By leveraging the dynamism of sparsity, our approach mitigates the impact of well-learned samples and prioritizes underperforming instances for improvement in generalization. Across five tasks of sequence labeling, we demonstrate that FISH-DIP can smoothly optimize the model in low resource settings offering upto 40% performance improvements over full fine-tuning depending on target evaluation settings. Also, compared to in-context learning and other parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches, FISH-DIP performs comparably or better, notably in extreme low-resource settings.

Language agents show potential in being capable of utilizing natural language for varied and intricate tasks in diverse environments, particularly when built upon large language models (LLMs). Current language agent frameworks aim to facilitate the construction of proof-of-concept language agents while neglecting the non-expert user access to agents and paying little attention to application-level designs. We present OpenAgents, an open platform for using and hosting language agents in the wild of everyday life. OpenAgents includes three agents: (1) Data Agent for data analysis with Python/SQL and data tools; (2) Plugins Agent with 200+ daily API tools; (3) Web Agent for autonomous web browsing. OpenAgents enables general users to interact with agent functionalities through a web user interface optimized for swift responses and common failures while offering developers and researchers a seamless deployment experience on local setups, providing a foundation for crafting innovative language agents and facilitating real-world evaluations. We elucidate the challenges and opportunities, aspiring to set a foundation for future research and development of real-world language agents.

Datasets that pair Knowledge Graphs (KG) and text together (KG-T) can be used to train forward and reverse neural models that generate text from KG and vice versa. However models trained on datasets where KG and text pairs are not equivalent can suffer from more hallucination and poorer recall. In this paper, we verify this empirically by generating datasets with different levels of noise and find that noisier datasets do indeed lead to more hallucination. We argue that the ability of forward and reverse models trained on a dataset to cyclically regenerate source KG or text is a proxy for the equivalence between the KG and the text in the dataset. Using cyclic evaluation we find that manually created WebNLG is much better than automatically created TeKGen and T-REx. Guided by these observations, we construct a new, improved dataset called LAGRANGE using heuristics meant to improve equivalence between KG and text and show the impact of each of the heuristics on cyclic evaluation. We also construct two synthetic datasets using large language models (LLMs), and observe that these are conducive to models that perform significantly well on cyclic generation of text, but less so on cyclic generation of KGs, probably because of a lack of a consistent underlying ontology.

In this paper, we study the problem of generating obstinate (over-stability) adversarial examples by word substitution in NLP, where input text is meaningfully changed but the model's prediction does not, even though it should. Previous word substitution approaches have predominantly focused on manually designed antonym-based strategies for generating obstinate adversarial examples, which hinders its application as these strategies can only find a subset of obstinate adversarial examples and require human efforts. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel word substitution method named GradObstinate, a gradient-based approach that automatically generates obstinate adversarial examples without any constraints on the search space or the need for manual design principles. To empirically evaluate the efficacy of GradObstinate, we conduct comprehensive experiments on five representative models (Electra, ALBERT, Roberta, DistillBERT, and CLIP) finetuned on four NLP benchmarks (SST-2, MRPC, SNLI, and SQuAD) and a language-grounding benchmark (MSCOCO). Extensive experiments show that our proposed GradObstinate generates more powerful obstinate adversarial examples, exhibiting a higher attack success rate compared to antonym-based methods. Furthermore, to show the transferability of obstinate word substitutions found by GradObstinate, we replace the words in four representative NLP benchmarks with their obstinate substitutions. Notably, obstinate substitutions exhibit a high success rate when transferred to other models in black-box settings, including even GPT-3 and ChatGPT. Examples of obstinate adversarial examples found by GradObstinate are available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/anonauthors/SecretLanguage.

To better care for the elderly and disabled, it is essential for service robots to have an effective fusion method of object detection and grasp estimation. However, limited research has been observed on the combination of object detection and grasp estimation. To overcome this technical difficulty, a novel integrated method of detection-grasping for specific object based on the box coordinate matching is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the SOLOv2 instance segmentation model is improved by adding channel attention module (CAM) and spatial attention module (SAM). Then, the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and CAM are added to the generative residual convolutional neural network (GR-CNN) model to optimize grasp estimation. Furthermore, a detection-grasping integrated algorithm based on box coordinate matching (DG-BCM) is proposed to obtain the fusion model of object detection and grasp estimation. For verification, experiments on object detection and grasp estimation are conducted separately to verify the superiority of improved models. Additionally, grasping tasks for several specific objects are implemented on a simulation platform, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of DG-BCM algorithm proposed in this paper.

Though end-to-end neural approaches have recently been dominating NLP tasks in both performance and ease-of-use, they lack interpretability and robustness. We propose Binder, a training-free neural-symbolic framework that maps the task input to a program, which (1) allows binding a unified API of language model (LM) functionalities to a programming language (e.g., SQL, Python) to extend its grammar coverage and thus tackle more diverse questions, (2) adopts an LM as both the program parser and the underlying model called by the API during execution, and (3) requires only a few in-context exemplar annotations. Specifically, we employ GPT-3 Codex as the LM. In the parsing stage, with only a few in-context exemplars, Codex is able to identify the part of the task input that cannot be answerable by the original programming language, correctly generate API calls to prompt Codex to solve the unanswerable part, and identify where to place the API calls while being compatible with the original grammar. In the execution stage, Codex can perform versatile functionalities (e.g., commonsense QA, information extraction) given proper prompts in the API calls. Binder achieves state-of-the-art results on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets, with explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. Note that previous best systems are all finetuned on tens of thousands of task-specific samples, while Binder only uses dozens of annotations as in-context exemplars without any training. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/Binder .

Existing text-to-SQL research only considers complete questions as the input, but lay-users might strive to formulate a complete question. To build a smarter natural language interface to database systems (NLIDB) that also processes incomplete questions, we propose a new task, prefix-to-SQL which takes question prefix from users as the input and predicts the intended SQL. We construct a new benchmark called PAGSAS that contains 124K user question prefixes and the intended SQL for 5 sub-tasks Advising, GeoQuery, Scholar, ATIS, and Spider. Additionally, we propose a new metric SAVE to measure how much effort can be saved by users. Experimental results show that PAGSAS is challenging even for strong baseline models such as T5. As we observe the difficulty of prefix-to-SQL is related to the number of omitted tokens, we incorporate curriculum learning of feeding examples with an increasing number of omitted tokens. This improves scores on various sub-tasks by as much as 9% recall scores on sub-task GeoQuery in PAGSAS.