The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Role of AI Quality Disclosure in Lie Detection

We investigate how low-quality AI advisors, lacking quality disclosures, can help spread text-based lies while seeming to help people detect lies. Participants in our experiment discern truth from lies by evaluating transcripts from a game show that mimicked deceptive social media exchanges on topics with objective truths. We find that when relying on low-quality advisors without disclosures, participants' truth-detection rates fall below their own abilities, which recovered once the AI's true effectiveness was revealed. Conversely, high-quality advisor enhances truth detection, regardless of disclosure. We discover that participants' expectations about AI capabilities contribute to their undue reliance on opaque, low-quality advisors.

DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models

Can the rapid advances in code generation, function calling, and data analysis using large language models (LLMs) help automate the search and verification of hypotheses purely from a set of provided datasets? To evaluate this question, we present DiscoveryBench, the first comprehensive benchmark that formalizes the multi-step process of data-driven discovery. The benchmark is designed to systematically assess current model capabilities in discovery tasks and provide a useful resource for improving them. Our benchmark contains 264 tasks collected across 6 diverse domains, such as sociology and engineering, by manually deriving discovery workflows from published papers to approximate the real-world challenges faced by researchers, where each task is defined by a dataset, its metadata, and a discovery goal in natural language. We additionally provide 903 synthetic tasks to conduct controlled evaluations across task complexity. Furthermore, our structured formalism of data-driven discovery enables a facet-based evaluation that provides useful insights into different failure modes. We evaluate several popular LLM-based reasoning frameworks using both open and closed LLMs as baselines on DiscoveryBench and find that even the best system scores only 25%. Our benchmark, thus, illustrates the challenges in autonomous data-driven discovery and serves as a valuable resource for the community to make progress.

DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents

Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains. However, developing and evaluating an AI agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DISCOVERYWORLD, the first virtual environment for developing and benchmarking an agent's ability to perform complete cycles of novel scientific discovery. DISCOVERYWORLD contains a variety of different challenges, covering topics as diverse as radioisotope dating, rocket science, and proteomics, to encourage development of general discovery skills rather than task-specific solutions. DISCOVERYWORLD itself is an inexpensive, simulated, text-based environment (with optional 2D visual overlay). It includes 120 different challenge tasks, spanning eight topics each with three levels of difficulty and several parametric variations. Each task requires an agent to form hypotheses, design and run experiments, analyze results, and act on conclusions. DISCOVERYWORLD further provides three automatic metrics for evaluating performance, based on (a) task completion, (b) task-relevant actions taken, and (c) the discovered explanatory knowledge. We find that strong baseline agents, that perform well in prior published environments, struggle on most DISCOVERYWORLD tasks, suggesting that DISCOVERYWORLD captures some of the novel challenges of discovery, and thus that DISCOVERYWORLD may help accelerate near-term development and assessment of scientific discovery competency in agents. Code available at: www.github.com/allenai/discoveryworld

Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning

We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes: Motivational Interviewing. Addressing such a task requires a system that can infer \textit{how} to motivate a user effectively. We propose DIIT, a framework that is capable of learning and applying conversation strategies in the form of natural language inductive rules from expert demonstrations. Automatic and human evaluation on instruction-following large language models show natural language strategy descriptions discovered by DIIR can improve active listening skills, reduce unsolicited advice, and promote more collaborative and less authoritative responses, outperforming various demonstration utilization methods.

Tell, Don't Show!: Language Guidance Eases Transfer Across Domains in Images and Videos

We introduce LaGTran, a novel framework that utilizes readily available or easily acquired text descriptions to guide robust transfer of discriminative knowledge from labeled source to unlabeled target data with domain shifts. While unsupervised adaptation methods have been established to address this problem, they show limitations in handling challenging domain shifts due to their exclusive operation within the pixel-space. Motivated by our observation that semantically richer text modality has more favorable transfer properties, we devise a transfer mechanism to use a source-trained text-classifier to generate predictions on the target text descriptions, and utilize these predictions as supervision for the corresponding images. Our approach driven by language guidance is surprisingly easy and simple, yet significantly outperforms all prior approaches on challenging datasets like GeoNet and DomainNet, validating its extreme effectiveness. To further extend the scope of our study beyond images, we introduce a new benchmark to study ego-exo transfer in videos and find that our language-aided LaGTran yields significant gains in this highly challenging and non-trivial transfer setting. Code, models, and proposed datasets are publicly available at https://tarun005.github.io/lagtran/.

Data-driven Discovery with Large Generative Models

With the accumulation of data at an unprecedented rate, its potential to fuel scientific discovery is growing exponentially. This position paper urges the Machine Learning (ML) community to exploit the capabilities of large generative models (LGMs) to develop automated systems for end-to-end data-driven discovery -- a paradigm encompassing the search and verification of hypotheses purely from a set of provided datasets, without the need for additional data collection or physical experiments. We first outline several desiderata for an ideal data-driven discovery system. Then, through DATAVOYAGER, a proof-of-concept utilizing GPT-4, we demonstrate how LGMs fulfill several of these desiderata -- a feat previously unattainable -- while also highlighting important limitations in the current system that open up opportunities for novel ML research. We contend that achieving accurate, reliable, and robust end-to-end discovery systems solely through the current capabilities of LGMs is challenging. We instead advocate for fail-proof tool integration, along with active user moderation through feedback mechanisms, to foster data-driven scientific discoveries with efficiency and reproducibility.

Skill Set Optimization: Reinforcing Language Model Behavior via Transferable Skills

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been used for sequential decision making in interactive environments. However, leveraging environment reward signals for continual LLM actor improvement is not straightforward. We propose Skill Set Optimization (SSO) for improving LLM actor performance through constructing and refining sets of transferable skills. SSO constructs skills by extracting common subtrajectories with high rewards and generating subgoals and instructions to represent each skill. These skills are provided to the LLM actor in-context to reinforce behaviors with high rewards. Then, SSO further refines the skill set by pruning skills that do not continue to result in high rewards. We evaluate our method in the classic videogame NetHack and the text environment ScienceWorld to demonstrate SSO's ability to optimize a set of skills and perform in-context policy improvement. SSO outperforms baselines by 40% in our custom NetHack task and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in ScienceWorld by 35%.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Customizing Open-Domain Procedures

How-to procedures, such as how to plant a garden, are ubiquitous. But one size does not fit all - humans often need to customize these procedural plans according to their specific needs, e.g., planting a garden without pesticides. While LLMs can fluently generate generic procedures, we present the first study on how well LLMs can customize open-domain procedures. We introduce CustomPlans, a probe dataset of customization hints that encodes diverse user needs for open-domain How-to procedures. Using LLMs as CustomizationAgent and ExecutionAgent in different settings, we establish their abilities to perform open-domain procedure customization. Human evaluation shows that using these agents in a Sequential setting is the best, but they are good enough only ~51% of the time. Error analysis shows that LLMs do not sufficiently address user customization needs in their generated procedures.

To Tell The Truth: Language of Deception and Language Models

Text-based misinformation permeates online discourses, yet evidence of people's ability to discern truth from such deceptive textual content is scarce. We analyze a novel TV game show data where conversations in a high-stake environment between individuals with conflicting objectives result in lies. We investigate the manifestation of potentially verifiable language cues of deception in the presence of objective truth, a distinguishing feature absent in previous text-based deception datasets. We show that there exists a class of detectors (algorithms) that have similar truth detection performance compared to human subjects, even when the former accesses only the language cues while the latter engages in conversations with complete access to all potential sources of cues (language and audio-visual). Our model, built on a large language model, employs a bottleneck framework to learn discernible cues to determine truth, an act of reasoning in which human subjects often perform poorly, even with incentives. Our model detects novel but accurate language cues in many cases where humans failed to detect deception, opening up the possibility of humans collaborating with algorithms and ameliorating their ability to detect the truth.

CLIN: A Continually Learning Language Agent for Rapid Task Adaptation and Generalization

Language agents have shown some ability to interact with an external environment, e.g., a virtual world such as ScienceWorld, to perform complex tasks, e.g., growing a plant, without the startup costs of reinforcement learning. However, despite their zero-shot capabilities, these agents to date do not continually improve over time beyond performance refinement on a specific task. Here we present CLIN, the first language-based agent to achieve this, so that it continually improves over multiple trials, including when both the environment and task are varied, and without requiring parameter updates. Our approach is to use a persistent, dynamic, textual memory centered on causal abstractions (rather than general "helpful hints") that is regularly updated after each trial so that the agent gradually learns useful knowledge for new trials. In the ScienceWorld benchmark, CLIN is able to continually improve on repeated trials on the same task and environment, outperforming state-of-the-art reflective language agents like Reflexion by 23 absolute points. CLIN can also transfer its learning to new environments (or new tasks), improving its zero-shot performance by 4 points (13 for new tasks) and can further improve performance there through continual memory updates, enhancing performance by an additional 17 points (7 for new tasks). This suggests a new architecture for agents built on frozen models that can still continually and rapidly improve over time.