MirrorStories: Reflecting Diversity through Personalized Narrative Generation with Large Language Models

This study explores the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating personalized "mirror stories" that reflect and resonate with individual readers' identities, addressing the significant lack of diversity in literature. We present MirrorStories, a corpus of 1,500 personalized short stories generated by integrating elements such as name, gender, age, ethnicity, reader interest, and story moral. We demonstrate that LLMs can effectively incorporate diverse identity elements into narratives, with human evaluators identifying personalized elements in the stories with high accuracy. Through a comprehensive evaluation involving 26 diverse human judges, we compare the effectiveness of MirrorStories against generic narratives. We find that personalized LLM-generated stories not only outscore generic human-written and LLM-generated ones across all metrics of engagement (with average ratings of 4.22 versus 3.37 on a 5-point scale), but also achieve higher textual diversity while preserving the intended moral. We also provide analyses that include bias assessments and a study on the potential for integrating images into personalized stories.

STOP! Benchmarking Large Language Models with Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions

Mitigating explicit and implicit biases in Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical focus in the field of natural language processing. However, many current methodologies evaluate scenarios in isolation, without considering the broader context or the spectrum of potential biases within each situation. To address this, we introduce the Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions (STOP) dataset, which includes 450 offensive progressions containing 2,700 unique sentences of varying severity that progressively escalate from less to more explicitly offensive. Covering a broad spectrum of 9 demographics and 46 sub-demographics, STOP ensures inclusivity and comprehensive coverage. We evaluate several leading closed- and open-source models, including GPT-4, Mixtral, and Llama 3. Our findings reveal that even the best-performing models detect bias inconsistently, with success rates ranging from 19.3% to 69.8%. We also demonstrate how aligning models with human judgments on STOP can improve model answer rates on sensitive tasks such as BBQ, StereoSet, and CrowS-Pairs by up to 191%, while maintaining or even improving performance. STOP presents a novel framework for assessing the complex nature of biases in LLMs, which will enable more effective bias mitigation strategies and facilitates the creation of fairer language models.

Confidence Under the Hood: An Investigation into the Confidence-Probability Alignment in Large Language Models

As the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes more widespread, understanding their self-evaluation of confidence in generated responses becomes increasingly important as it is integral to the reliability of the output of these models. We introduce the concept of Confidence-Probability Alignment, that connects an LLM's internal confidence, quantified by token probabilities, to the confidence conveyed in the model's response when explicitly asked about its certainty. Using various datasets and prompting techniques that encourage model introspection, we probe the alignment between models' internal and expressed confidence. These techniques encompass using structured evaluation scales to rate confidence, including answer options when prompting, and eliciting the model's confidence level for outputs it does not recognize as its own. Notably, among the models analyzed, OpenAI's GPT-4 showed the strongest confidence-probability alignment, with an average Spearman's $\hat{\rho}$ of 0.42, across a wide range of tasks. Our work contributes to the ongoing efforts to facilitate risk assessment in the application of LLMs and to further our understanding of model trustworthiness.

Picturing Ambiguity: A Visual Twist on the Winograd Schema Challenge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in tasks like the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), showcasing advanced textual common-sense reasoning. However, applying this reasoning to multimodal domains, where understanding text and images together is essential, remains a substantial challenge. To address this, we introduce WinoVis, a novel dataset specifically designed to probe text-to-image models on pronoun disambiguation within multimodal contexts. Utilizing GPT-4 for prompt generation and Diffusion Attentive Attribution Maps (DAAM) for heatmap analysis, we propose a novel evaluation framework that isolates the models' ability in pronoun disambiguation from other visual processing challenges. Evaluation of successive model versions reveals that, despite incremental advancements, Stable Diffusion 2.0 achieves a precision of 56.7% on WinoVis, only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further error analysis identifies important areas for future research aimed at advancing text-to-image models in their ability to interpret and interact with the complex visual world.

Subtle Biases Need Subtler Measures: Dual Metrics for Evaluating Representative and Affinity Bias in Large Language Models

Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has often neglected subtle biases that, although less apparent, can significantly influence the models' outputs toward particular social narratives. This study addresses two such biases within LLMs: \textit{representative bias}, which denotes a tendency of LLMs to generate outputs that mirror the experiences of certain identity groups, and \textit{affinity bias}, reflecting the models' evaluative preferences for specific narratives or viewpoints. We introduce two novel metrics to measure these biases: the Representative Bias Score (RBS) and the Affinity Bias Score (ABS), and present the Creativity-Oriented Generation Suite (CoGS), a collection of open-ended tasks such as short story writing and poetry composition, designed with customized rubrics to detect these subtle biases. Our analysis uncovers marked representative biases in prominent LLMs, with a preference for identities associated with being white, straight, and men. Furthermore, our investigation of affinity bias reveals distinctive evaluative patterns within each model, akin to `bias fingerprints'. This trend is also seen in human evaluators, highlighting a complex interplay between human and machine bias perceptions.

EvoGrad: A Dynamic Take on the Winograd Schema Challenge with Human Adversaries

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), a coreference resolution task testing common-sense reasoning through pronoun disambiguation, they struggle with instances that feature minor alterations or rewording. To address this, we introduce EvoGrad, an open-source platform that harnesses a human-in-the-loop approach to create a dynamic dataset tailored to such altered WSC instances. Leveraging ChatGPT's capabilities, we expand our task instances from 182 to 3,691, setting a new benchmark for diverse common-sense reasoning datasets. Additionally, we introduce the error depth metric, assessing model stability in dynamic tasks. Our results emphasize the challenge posed by EvoGrad: Even the best performing LLM, GPT-3.5, achieves an accuracy of 65.0% with an average error depth of 7.2, a stark contrast to human performance of 92. 8% accuracy without perturbation errors. This highlights ongoing model limitations and the value of dynamic datasets in uncovering them.

WSC+: Enhancing The Winograd Schema Challenge Using Tree-of-Experts

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) serves as a prominent benchmark for evaluating machine understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at answering WSC questions, their ability to generate such questions remains less explored. In this work, we propose Tree-of-Experts (ToE), a novel prompting method which enhances the generation of WSC instances (50% valid cases vs. 10% in recent methods). Using this approach, we introduce WSC+, a novel dataset comprising 3,026 LLM-generated sentences. Notably, we extend the WSC framework by incorporating new 'ambiguous' and 'offensive' categories, providing a deeper insight into model overconfidence and bias. Our analysis reveals nuances in generation-evaluation consistency, suggesting that LLMs may not always outperform in evaluating their own generated questions when compared to those crafted by other models. On WSC+, GPT-4, the top-performing LLM, achieves an accuracy of 68.7%, significantly below the human benchmark of 95.1%.

Debiasing should be Good and Bad: Measuring the Consistency of Debiasing Techniques in Language Models

Debiasing methods that seek to mitigate the tendency of Language Models (LMs) to occasionally output toxic or inappropriate text have recently gained traction. In this paper, we propose a standardized protocol which distinguishes methods that yield not only desirable results, but are also consistent with their mechanisms and specifications. For example, we ask, given a debiasing method that is developed to reduce toxicity in LMs, if the definition of toxicity used by the debiasing method is reversed, would the debiasing results also be reversed? We used such considerations to devise three criteria for our new protocol: Specification Polarity, Specification Importance, and Domain Transferability. As a case study, we apply our protocol to a popular debiasing method, Self-Debiasing, and compare it to one we propose, called Instructive Debiasing, and demonstrate that consistency is as important an aspect to debiasing viability as is simply a desirable result. We show that our protocol provides essential insights into the generalizability and interpretability of debiasing methods that may otherwise go overlooked.

Dynamic-Pix2Pix: Noise Injected cGAN for Modeling Input and Target Domain Joint Distributions with Limited Training Data

Learning to translate images from a source to a target domain with applications such as converting simple line drawing to oil painting has attracted significant attention. The quality of translated images is directly related to two crucial issues. First, the consistency of the output distribution with that of the target is essential. Second, the generated output should have a high correlation with the input. Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, cGANs, are the most common models for translating images. The performance of a cGAN drops when we use a limited training dataset. In this work, we increase the Pix2Pix (a form of cGAN) target distribution modeling ability with the help of dynamic neural network theory. Our model has two learning cycles. The model learns the correlation between input and ground truth in the first cycle. Then, the model's architecture is refined in the second cycle to learn the target distribution from noise input. These processes are executed in each iteration of the training procedure. Helping the cGAN learn the target distribution from noise input results in a better model generalization during the test time and allows the model to fit almost perfectly to the target domain distribution. As a result, our model surpasses the Pix2Pix model in segmenting HC18 and Montgomery's chest x-ray images. Both qualitative and Dice scores show the superiority of our model. Although our proposed method does not use thousand of additional data for pretraining, it produces comparable results for the in and out-domain generalization compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

DGAFF: Deep Genetic Algorithm Fitness Formation for EEG Bio-Signal Channel Selection

Brain-computer interface systems aim to facilitate human-computer interactions in a great deal by direct translation of brain signals for computers. Recently, using many electrodes has caused better performance in these systems. However, increasing the number of recorded electrodes leads to additional time, hardware, and computational costs besides undesired complications of the recording process. Channel selection has been utilized to decrease data dimension and eliminate irrelevant channels while reducing the noise effects. Furthermore, the technique lowers the time and computational costs in real-time applications. We present a channel selection method, which combines a sequential search method with a genetic algorithm called Deep GA Fitness Formation (DGAFF). The proposed method accelerates the convergence of the genetic algorithm and increases the system's performance. The system evaluation is based on a lightweight deep neural network that automates the whole model training process. The proposed method outperforms other channel selection methods in classifying motor imagery on the utilized dataset.