Mitigating Metric Bias in Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

While Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding using metrics such as COMET or MetricX has outperformed traditional decoding methods such as greedy or beam search, it introduces a challenge we refer to as metric bias. As MBR decoding aims to produce translations that score highly according to a specific utility metric, this very process makes it impossible to use the same metric for both decoding and evaluation, as improvements might simply be due to reward hacking rather than reflecting real quality improvements. In this work we find that compared to human ratings, neural metrics not only overestimate the quality of MBR decoding when the same metric is used as the utility metric, but they also overestimate the quality of MBR/QE decoding with other neural utility metrics as well. We also show that the metric bias issue can be mitigated by using an ensemble of utility metrics during MBR decoding: human evaluations show that MBR decoding using an ensemble of utility metrics outperforms a single utility metric.

Transforming Wearable Data into Health Insights using Large Language Model Agents

Despite the proliferation of wearable health trackers and the importance of sleep and exercise to health, deriving actionable personalized insights from wearable data remains a challenge because doing so requires non-trivial open-ended analysis of these data. The recent rise of large language model (LLM) agents, which can use tools to reason about and interact with the world, presents a promising opportunity to enable such personalized analysis at scale. Yet, the application of LLM agents in analyzing personal health is still largely untapped. In this paper, we introduce the Personal Health Insights Agent (PHIA), an agent system that leverages state-of-the-art code generation and information retrieval tools to analyze and interpret behavioral health data from wearables. We curate two benchmark question-answering datasets of over 4000 health insights questions. Based on 650 hours of human and expert evaluation we find that PHIA can accurately address over 84% of factual numerical questions and more than 83% of crowd-sourced open-ended questions. This work has implications for advancing behavioral health across the population, potentially enabling individuals to interpret their own wearable data, and paving the way for a new era of accessible, personalized wellness regimens that are informed by data-driven insights.

Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners

Large language models (LLMs) can capture rich representations of concepts that are useful for real-world tasks. However, language alone is limited. While existing LLMs excel at text-based inferences, health applications require that models be grounded in numerical data (e.g., vital signs, laboratory values in clinical domains; steps, movement in the wellness domain) that is not easily or readily expressed as text in existing training corpus. We demonstrate that with only few-shot tuning, a large language model is capable of grounding various physiological and behavioral time-series data and making meaningful inferences on numerous health tasks for both clinical and wellness contexts. Using data from wearable and medical sensor recordings, we evaluate these capabilities on the tasks of cardiac signal analysis, physical activity recognition, metabolic calculation (e.g., calories burned), and estimation of stress reports and mental health screeners.

Automatic Correction of Human Translations

We introduce translation error correction (TEC), the task of automatically correcting human-generated translations. Imperfections in machine translations (MT) have long motivated systems for improving translations post-hoc with automatic post-editing. In contrast, little attention has been devoted to the problem of automatically correcting human translations, despite the intuition that humans make distinct errors that machines would be well-suited to assist with, from typos to inconsistencies in translation conventions. To investigate this, we build and release the Aced corpus with three TEC datasets. We show that human errors in TEC exhibit a more diverse range of errors and far fewer translation fluency errors than the MT errors in automatic post-editing datasets, suggesting the need for dedicated TEC models that are specialized to correct human errors. We show that pre-training instead on synthetic errors based on human errors improves TEC F-score by as much as 5.1 points. We conducted a human-in-the-loop user study with nine professional translation editors and found that the assistance of our TEC system led them to produce significantly higher quality revised translations.

The Impact of Text Presentation on Translator Performance

Widely used computer-aided translation (CAT) tools divide documents into segments such as sentences and arrange them in a side-by-side, spreadsheet-like view. We present the first controlled evaluation of these design choices on translator performance, measuring speed and accuracy in three experimental text processing tasks. We find significant evidence that sentence-by-sentence presentation enables faster text reproduction and within-sentence error identification compared to unsegmented text, and that a top-and-bottom arrangement of source and target sentences enables faster text reproduction compared to a side-by-side arrangement. For revision, on the other hand, our results suggest that presenting unsegmented text results in the highest accuracy and time efficiency. Our findings have direct implications for best practices in designing CAT tools.