Snippet-based Conversational Recommender System

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) engage users in interactive dialogues to gather preferences and provide personalized recommendations. Traditionally, CRS rely on pre-defined attributes or expensive, domain-specific annotated datasets to guide conversations, which limits flexibility and adaptability across domains. In this work, we introduce SnipRec, a novel CRS that enhances dialogues and recommendations by extracting diverse expressions and preferences from user-generated content (UGC) like customer reviews. Using large language models, SnipRec maps user responses and UGC to concise snippets, which are used to generate clarification questions and retrieve relevant items. Our approach eliminates the need for domain-specific training, making it adaptable to new domains and effective without prior knowledge of user preferences. Extensive experiments on the Yelp dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of snippet-based representations against document and sentence-based representations. Additionally, SnipRec is able to improve Hits@10 by 0.25 over the course of five conversational turns, underscoring the efficiency of SnipRec in capturing user preferences through multi-turn conversations.

A Blueprint Architecture of Compound AI Systems for Enterprise

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities surpassing conventional NLP challenges, creating opportunities for use in production use cases. Towards this goal, there is a notable shift to building compound AI systems, wherein LLMs are integrated into an expansive software infrastructure with many components like models, retrievers, databases and tools. In this paper, we introduce a blueprint architecture for compound AI systems to operate in enterprise settings cost-effectively and feasibly. Our proposed architecture aims for seamless integration with existing compute and data infrastructure, with ``stream'' serving as the key orchestration concept to coordinate data and instructions among agents and other components. Task and data planners, respectively, break down, map, and optimize tasks and data to available agents and data sources defined in respective registries, given production constraints such as accuracy and latency.

MEGAnno+: A Human-LLM Collaborative Annotation System

Large language models (LLMs) can label data faster and cheaper than humans for various NLP tasks. Despite their prowess, LLMs may fall short in understanding of complex, sociocultural, or domain-specific context, potentially leading to incorrect annotations. Therefore, we advocate a collaborative approach where humans and LLMs work together to produce reliable and high-quality labels. We present MEGAnno+, a human-LLM collaborative annotation system that offers effective LLM agent and annotation management, convenient and robust LLM annotation, and exploratory verification of LLM labels by humans.

Characterizing Large Language Models as Rationalizers of Knowledge-intensive Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) are proficient at generating fluent text with minimal task-specific supervision. Yet, their ability to provide well-grounded rationalizations for knowledge-intensive tasks remains under-explored. Such tasks, like commonsense multiple-choice questions, require rationales based on world knowledge to support predictions and refute alternate options. We consider the task of generating knowledge-guided rationalization in natural language by using expert-written examples in a few-shot manner. Surprisingly, crowd-workers preferred knowledge-grounded rationales over crowdsourced rationalizations, citing their factuality, sufficiency, and comprehensive refutations. Although LLMs-generated rationales were preferable, further improvements in conciseness and novelty are required. In another study, we show how rationalization of incorrect model predictions erodes humans' trust in LLM-generated rationales. Motivated by these observations, we create a two-stage pipeline to review task predictions and eliminate potential incorrect decisions before rationalization, enabling trustworthy rationale generation.

SemARFlow: Injecting Semantics into Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation for Autonomous Driving

Unsupervised optical flow estimation is especially hard near occlusions and motion boundaries and in low-texture regions. We show that additional information such as semantics and domain knowledge can help better constrain this problem. We introduce SemARFlow, an unsupervised optical flow network designed for autonomous driving data that takes estimated semantic segmentation masks as additional inputs. This additional information is injected into the encoder and into a learned upsampler that refines the flow output. In addition, a simple yet effective semantic augmentation module provides self-supervision when learning flow and its boundaries for vehicles, poles, and sky. Together, these injections of semantic information improve the KITTI-2015 optical flow test error rate from 11.80% to 8.38%. We also show visible improvements around object boundaries as well as a greater ability to generalize across datasets. Code will be made available.

Towards Multifaceted Human-Centered AI

Human-centered AI workflows involve stakeholders with multiple roles interacting with each other and automated agents to accomplish diverse tasks. In this paper, we call for a holistic view when designing support mechanisms, such as interaction paradigms, interfaces, and systems, for these multifaceted workflows.

MEGAnno: Exploratory Labeling for NLP in Computational Notebooks

We present MEGAnno, a novel exploratory annotation framework designed for NLP researchers and practitioners. Unlike existing labeling tools that focus on data labeling only, our framework aims to support a broader, iterative ML workflow including data exploration and model development. With MEGAnno's API, users can programmatically explore the data through sophisticated search and automated suggestion functions and incrementally update task schema as their project evolve. Combined with our widget, the users can interactively sort, filter, and assign labels to multiple items simultaneously in the same notebook where the rest of the NLP project resides. We demonstrate MEGAnno's flexible, exploratory, efficient, and seamless labeling experience through a sentiment analysis use case.

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

Optical Flow Training under Limited Label Budget via Active Learning

Supervised training of optical flow predictors generally yields better accuracy than unsupervised training. However, the improved performance comes at an often high annotation cost. Semi-supervised training trades off accuracy against annotation cost. We use a simple yet effective semi-supervised training method to show that even a small fraction of labels can improve flow accuracy by a significant margin over unsupervised training. In addition, we propose active learning methods based on simple heuristics to further reduce the number of labels required to achieve the same target accuracy. Our experiments on both synthetic and real optical flow datasets show that our semi-supervised networks generally need around 50% of the labels to achieve close to full-label accuracy, and only around 20% with active learning on Sintel. We also analyze and show insights on the factors that may influence our active learning performance. Code will be made available soon.

Out-of-Distribution Detection in Dermatology using Input Perturbation and Subset Scanning

Recent advances in deep learning have led to breakthroughs in the development of automated skin disease classification. As we observe an increasing interest in these models in the dermatology space, it is crucial to address aspects such as the robustness towards input data distribution shifts. Current skin disease models could make incorrect inferences for test samples from different hardware devices and clinical settings or unknown disease samples, which are out-of-distribution (OOD) from the training samples. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach that detect these OOD samples prior to making any decision. The detection is performed via scanning in the latent space representation (e.g., activations of the inner layers of any pre-trained skin disease classifier). The input samples could also perturbed to maximise divergence of OOD samples. We validate our ODD detection approach in two use cases: 1) identify samples collected from different protocols, and 2) detect samples from unknown disease classes. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, data-driven dermatology applications may deepen the disparity in clinical care across racial and ethnic groups since most datasets are reported to suffer from bias in skin tone distribution. Therefore, we also evaluate the fairness of these OOD detection methods across different skin tones. Our experiments resulted in competitive performance across multiple datasets in detecting OOD samples, which could be used (in the future) to design more effective transfer learning techniques prior to inferring on these samples.