Show Me the Work: Fact-Checkers' Requirements for Explainable Automated Fact-Checking

The pervasiveness of large language models and generative AI in online media has amplified the need for effective automated fact-checking to assist fact-checkers in tackling the increasing volume and sophistication of misinformation. The complex nature of fact-checking demands that automated fact-checking systems provide explanations that enable fact-checkers to scrutinise their outputs. However, it is unclear how these explanations should align with the decision-making and reasoning processes of fact-checkers to be effectively integrated into their workflows. Through semi-structured interviews with fact-checking professionals, we bridge this gap by: (i) providing an account of how fact-checkers assess evidence, make decisions, and explain their processes; (ii) examining how fact-checkers use automated tools in practice; and (iii) identifying fact-checker explanation requirements for automated fact-checking tools. The findings show unmet explanation needs and identify important criteria for replicable fact-checking explanations that trace the model's reasoning path, reference specific evidence, and highlight uncertainty and information gaps.

Specializing Large Language Models to Simulate Survey Response Distributions for Global Populations

Large-scale surveys are essential tools for informing social science research and policy, but running surveys is costly and time-intensive. If we could accurately simulate group-level survey results, this would therefore be very valuable to social science research. Prior work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for simulating human behaviors, mostly through prompting. In this paper, we are the first to specialize LLMs for the task of simulating survey response distributions. As a testbed, we use country-level results from two global cultural surveys. We devise a fine-tuning method based on first-token probabilities to minimize divergence between predicted and actual response distributions for a given question. Then, we show that this method substantially outperforms other methods and zero-shot classifiers, even on unseen questions, countries, and a completely unseen survey. While even our best models struggle with the task, especially on unseen questions, our results demonstrate the benefits of specialization for simulation, which may accelerate progress towards sufficiently accurate simulation in the future.

Collecting Cost-Effective, High-Quality Truthfulness Assessments with LLM Summarized Evidence

With the degradation of guardrails against mis- and disinformation online, it is more critical than ever to be able to effectively combat it. In this paper, we explore the efficiency and effectiveness of using crowd-sourced truthfulness assessments based on condensed, large language model (LLM) generated summaries of online sources. We compare the use of generated summaries to the use of original web pages in an A/B testing setting, where we employ a large and diverse pool of crowd-workers to perform the truthfulness assessment. We evaluate the quality of assessments, the efficiency with which assessments are performed, and the behavior and engagement of participants. Our results demonstrate that the Summary modality, which relies on summarized evidence, offers no significant change in assessment accuracy over the Standard modality, while significantly increasing the speed with which assessments are performed. Workers using summarized evidence produce a significantly higher number of assessments in the same time frame, reducing the cost needed to acquire truthfulness assessments. Additionally, the Summary modality maximizes both the inter-annotator agreements as well as the reliance on and perceived usefulness of evidence, demonstrating the utility of summarized evidence without sacrificing the quality of assessments.

With Great Backbones Comes Great Adversarial Transferability

Advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) for machine vision have improved representation robustness and model performance, giving rise to pre-trained backbones like \emph{ResNet} and \emph{ViT} models tuned with SSL methods such as \emph{SimCLR}. Due to the computational and data demands of pre-training, the utilization of such backbones becomes a strenuous necessity. However, employing these backbones may inherit vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. While adversarial robustness has been studied under \emph{white-box} and \emph{black-box} settings, the robustness of models tuned on pre-trained backbones remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the role of tuning meta-information in mitigating exploitation risks is unclear. This work systematically evaluates the adversarial robustness of such models across $20,000$ combinations of tuning meta-information, including fine-tuning techniques, backbone families, datasets, and attack types. We propose using proxy models to transfer attacks, simulating varying levels of target knowledge by fine-tuning these proxies with diverse configurations. Our findings reveal that proxy-based attacks approach the effectiveness of \emph{white-box} methods, even with minimal tuning knowledge. We also introduce a naive "backbone attack," leveraging only the backbone to generate adversarial samples, which outperforms \emph{black-box} attacks and rivals \emph{white-box} methods, highlighting critical risks in model-sharing practices. Finally, our ablations reveal how increasing tuning meta-information impacts attack transferability, measuring each meta-information combination.

A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps address the limitations of the parametric knowledge embedded within a language model (LM). However, investigations of how LMs utilise retrieved information of varying complexity in real-world scenarios have been limited to synthetic contexts. We introduce DRUID (Dataset of Retrieved Unreliable, Insufficient and Difficult-to-understand contexts) with real-world queries and contexts manually annotated for stance. The dataset is based on the prototypical task of automated claim verification, for which automated retrieval of real-world evidence is crucial. We compare DRUID to synthetic datasets (CounterFact, ConflictQA) and find that artificial datasets often fail to represent the complex and diverse real-world context settings. We show that synthetic datasets exaggerate context characteristics rare in real retrieved data, which leads to inflated context utilisation results, as measured by our novel ACU score. Moreover, while previous work has mainly focused on singleton context characteristics to explain context utilisation, correlations between singleton context properties and ACU on DRUID are surprisingly small compared to other properties related to context source. Overall, our work underscores the need for real-world aligned context utilisation studies to represent and improve performance in real-world RAG settings.

Graph-Guided Textual Explanation Generation Framework

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are commonly used to provide plausible free-text explanations of a model's reasoning about its predictions. However, recent work has questioned the faithfulness of NLEs, as they may not accurately reflect the model's internal reasoning process regarding its predicted answer. In contrast, highlight explanations -- input fragments identified as critical for the model's predictions -- exhibit measurable faithfulness, which has been incrementally improved through existing research. Building on this foundation, we propose G-Tex, a Graph-Guided Textual Explanation Generation framework designed to enhance the faithfulness of NLEs by leveraging highlight explanations. Specifically, highlight explanations are extracted as highly faithful cues representing the model's reasoning and are subsequently encoded through a graph neural network layer, which explicitly guides the NLE generation process. This alignment ensures that the generated explanations closely reflect the model's underlying reasoning. Experiments on T5 and BART using three reasoning datasets show that G-Tex improves NLE faithfulness by up to 17.59% compared to baseline methods. Additionally, G-Tex generates NLEs with greater semantic and lexical similarity to human-written ones. Human evaluations show that G-Tex can decrease redundant content and enhance the overall quality of NLEs. As our work introduces a novel method for explicitly guiding NLE generation to improve faithfulness, we hope it will serve as a stepping stone for addressing additional criteria for NLE and generated text overall.

Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond

Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive in LLMs that goes beyond multilinguality and builds on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this paper, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking the definitions of culture from anthropology and psychology as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of Human-Computer Interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.

FLARE: Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration

Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly use prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), assuming the resulting generation will have a more granular exploration and reasoning over the question space and scope. However, such methods struggle with generating outputs that are faithful to the intermediate chain of reasoning produced by the model. On the other end of the spectrum, neuro-symbolic methods such as Faithful CoT (F-CoT) propose to combine LLMs with external symbolic solvers. While such approaches boast a high degree of faithfulness, they usually require a model trained for code generation and struggle with tasks that are ambiguous or hard to formalise strictly. We introduce \textbf{F}aithful \textbf{L}ogic-\textbf{A}ided \textbf{R}easoning and \textbf{E}xploration (\textbf{\ours}), a novel interpretable approach for traversing the problem space using task decompositions. We use the LLM to plan a solution, soft-formalise the query into facts and predicates using a logic programming code and simulate that code execution using an exhaustive multi-hop search over the defined space. Our method allows us to compute the faithfulness of the reasoning process w.r.t. the generated code and analyse the steps of the multi-hop search without relying on external solvers. Our methods achieve SOTA results on $\mathbf{7}$ out of $\mathbf{9}$ diverse reasoning benchmarks. We also show that model faithfulness positively correlates with overall performance and further demonstrate that {\textbf{\ours}} allows pinpointing the decisive factors sufficient for and leading to the correct answer with optimal reasoning during the multi-hop search.

Can Transformers Learn $n$-gram Language Models?

Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the learning algorithm, and training data. To test whether theoretical lower bounds imply \emph{learnability} of formal languages, we turn to recent work relating transformers to $n$-gram language models (LMs). We study transformers' ability to learn random $n$-gram LMs of two kinds: ones with arbitrary next-symbol probabilities and ones where those are defined with shared parameters. We find that classic estimation techniques for $n$-gram LMs such as add-$\lambda$ smoothing outperform transformers on the former, while transformers perform better on the latter, outperforming methods specifically designed to learn $n$-gram LMs.

Claim Verification in the Age of Large Language Models: A Survey

The large and ever-increasing amount of data available on the Internet coupled with the laborious task of manual claim and fact verification has sparked the interest in the development of automated claim verification systems. Several deep learning and transformer-based models have been proposed for this task over the years. With the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their superior performance in several NLP tasks, we have seen a surge of LLM-based approaches to claim verification along with the use of novel methods such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). In this survey, we present a comprehensive account of recent claim verification frameworks using LLMs. We describe the different components of the claim verification pipeline used in these frameworks in detail including common approaches to retrieval, prompting, and fine-tuning. Finally, we describe publicly available English datasets created for this task.