To address this, some works have proposed piecewise linear scalar-izations inspired by economics [Busa-Fekete et al., 2017], while for multi-armed bandits, scalarized

Autonomous experiments (AEs) are transforming how scientific research is conducted by integrating artificial intelligence with automated experimental platforms. Current AEs primarily focus on the optimization of a predefined target; while accelerating this goal, such an approach limits the discovery of unexpected or unknown physical phenomena. Here, we introduce a novel framework, INS2ANE (Integrated Novelty Score-Strategic Autonomous Non-Smooth Exploration), to enhance the discovery of novel phenomena in autonomous experimentation. Our method integrates two key components: (1) a novelty scoring system that evaluates the uniqueness of experimental results, and (2) a strategic sampling mechanism that promotes exploration of under-sampled regions even if they appear less promising by conventional criteria. We validate this approach on a pre-acquired dataset with a known ground truth comprising of image-spectral pairs. We further implement the process on autonomous scanning probe microscopy experiments. INS2ANE significantly increases the diversity of explored phenomena in comparison to conventional optimization routines, enhancing the likelihood of discovering previously unobserved phenomena. These results demonstrate the potential for AE to enhance the depth of scientific discovery; in combination with the efficiency provided by AEs, this approach promises to accelerate scientific research by simultaneously navigating complex experimental spaces to uncover new phenomena.

Perturbation-based explanation methods such as LIME and SHAP are commonly applied to text classification. This work focuses on their extension to generative language models. To address the challenges of text as output and long text inputs, we propose a general framework called MExGen that can be instantiated with different attribution algorithms. To handle text output, we introduce the notion of scalarizers for mapping text to real numbers and investigate multiple possibilities. To handle long inputs, we take a multi-level approach, proceeding from coarser levels of granularity to finer ones, and focus on algorithms with linear scaling in model queries. We conduct a systematic evaluation, both automated and human, of perturbation-based attribution methods for summarization and context-grounded question answering. The results show that our framework can provide more locally faithful explanations of generated outputs.

Generative Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities for a wide range of applications, but reducing ungrounded or erroneous responses remains a major growth area. Unlike task-specific models, there lack an effective method to calibrate the confidence level of LLM responses to indicate potential errors and facilitate human-in-the-loop verification. An important source of calibration stems from expert-stipulated programmatic supervision, which is often available at low cost but has its own limitations such as noise and coverage. In this paper, we introduce a Pareto optimal self-supervision framework that can leverage available programmatic supervision to systematically calibrate LLM responses by producing a risk score for every LLM response, without any additional manual efforts. This is accomplished by learning a harmonizer model to align with LLM output as well as other weak supervision sources. The model assigns higher risk scores to more uncertain LLM responses and facilitate error correction. Experiments on standard relation extraction and classification tasks in biomedical and general domains demonstrate that the proposed risk score is highly correlated with the actual LLM error rate. By using a dynamic prompting strategy based on the risk score, we observed significant accuracy improvement for off-the-shelf LLMs, boosting GPT-3.5 results past state-of-the-art (SOTA) weak supervision model and GPT-4 results past SOTA supervised results on challenging evaluation datasets.

We describe a light-weight yet performant system for hyper-parameter optimization that approximately minimizes an overall scalar cost function that is obtained by combining multiple performance objectives using a target-priority-limit scalarizer. It also supports a trade-off mode, where the goal is to find an appropriate trade-off among objectives by interacting with the user. We focus on the common scenario where there are on the order of tens of hyper-parameters, each with various attributes such as a range of continuous values, or a finite list of values, and whether it should be treated on a linear or logarithmic scale. The system supports multiple asynchronous simulations and is robust to simulation stragglers and failures. While the algorithm we describe will work in principle for any value of n, our focus is on the case where n is modest (e.g., < 10). Each of these objectives has a sense, which means that we either want the objective to be large (i.e., to maximize it) or small (i.e., to minimize it).