Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI

Applications of Generative AI (Gen AI) are expected to revolutionize a number of different areas, ranging from science & medicine to education. The potential for these seismic changes has triggered a lively debate about the potential risks of the technology, and resulted in calls for tighter regulation, in particular from some of the major tech companies who are leading in AI development. This regulation is likely to put at risk the budding field of open-source generative AI. Using a three-stage framework for Gen AI development (near, mid and long-term), we analyze the risks and opportunities of open-source generative AI models with similar capabilities to the ones currently available (near to mid-term) and with greater capabilities (long-term). We argue that, overall, the benefits of open-source Gen AI outweigh its risks. As such, we encourage the open sourcing of models, training and evaluation data, and provide a set of recommendations and best practices for managing risks associated with open-source generative AI.

A Framework to Model ML Engineering Processes

The development of Machine Learning (ML) based systems is complex and requires multidisciplinary teams with diverse skill sets. This may lead to communication issues or misapplication of best practices. Process models can alleviate these challenges by standardizing task orchestration, providing a common language to facilitate communication, and nurturing a collaborative environment. Unfortunately, current process modeling languages are not suitable for describing the development of such systems. In this paper, we introduce a framework for modeling ML-based software development processes, built around a domain-specific language and derived from an analysis of scientific and gray literature. A supporting toolkit is also available.

LangBiTe: A Platform for Testing Bias in Large Language Models

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into various software applications raises concerns about their potential biases. Typically, those models are trained on a vast amount of data scrapped from forums, websites, social media and other internet sources, which may instill harmful and discriminating behavior into the model. To address this issue, we present LangBiTe, a testing platform to systematically assess the presence of biases within an LLM. LangBiTe enables development teams to tailor their test scenarios, and automatically generate and execute the test cases according to a set of user-defined ethical requirements. Each test consists of a prompt fed into the LLM and a corresponding test oracle that scrutinizes the LLM's response for the identification of biases. LangBite provides users with the bias evaluation of LLMs, and end-to-end traceability between the initial ethical requirements and the insights obtained.

Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open Source Generative AI

In the next few years, applications of Generative AI are expected to revolutionize a number of different areas, ranging from science & medicine to education. The potential for these seismic changes has triggered a lively debate about potential risks and resulted in calls for tighter regulation, in particular from some of the major tech companies who are leading in AI development. This regulation is likely to put at risk the budding field of open source Generative AI. We argue for the responsible open sourcing of generative AI models in the near and medium term. To set the stage, we first introduce an AI openness taxonomy system and apply it to 40 current large language models. We then outline differential benefits and risks of open versus closed source AI and present potential risk mitigation, ranging from best practices to calls for technical and scientific contributions. We hope that this report will add a much needed missing voice to the current public discourse on near to mid-term AI safety and other societal impact.

On the Readiness of Scientific Data for a Fair and Transparent Use in Machine Learning

To ensure the fairness and trustworthiness of machine learning (ML) systems, recent legislative initiatives and relevant research in the ML community have pointed out the need to document the data used to train ML models. Besides, data-sharing practices in many scientific domains have evolved in recent years for reproducibility purposes. In this sense, the adoption of these practices by academic institutions has encouraged researchers to publish their data and technical documentation in peer-reviewed publications such as data papers. In this study, we analyze how this scientific data documentation meets the needs of the ML community and regulatory bodies for its use in ML technologies. We examine a sample of 4041 data papers of different domains, assessing their completeness and coverage of the requested dimensions, and trends in recent years, putting special emphasis on the most and least documented dimensions. As a result, we propose a set of recommendation guidelines for data creators and scientific data publishers to increase their data's preparedness for its transparent and fairer use in ML technologies.

Towards the Automatic Generation of Conversational Interfaces to Facilitate the Exploration of Tabular Data

Tabular data is the most common format to publish and exchange structured data online. A clear example is the growing number of open data portals published by all types of public administrations. However, exploitation of these data sources is currently limited to technical people able to programmatically manipulate and digest such data. As an alternative, we propose the use of chatbots to offer a conversational interface to facilitate the exploration of tabular data sources. With our approach, any regular citizen can benefit and leverage them. Moreover, our chatbots are not manually created: instead, they are automatically generated from the data source itself thanks to the instantiation of a configurable collection of conversation patterns.

A domain-specific language for describing machine learning datasets

Datasets play a central role in the training and evaluation of machine learning (ML) models. But they are also the root cause of many undesired model behaviors, such as biased predictions. To overcome this situation, the ML community is proposing a data-centric cultural shift where data issues are given the attention they deserve, and more standard practices around the gathering and processing of datasets start to be discussed and established. So far, these proposals are mostly high-level guidelines described in natural language and, as such, they are difficult to formalize and apply to particular datasets. In this sense, and inspired by these proposals, we define a new domain-specific language (DSL) to precisely describe machine learning datasets in terms of their structure, data provenance, and social concerns. We believe this DSL will facilitate any ML initiative to leverage and benefit from this data-centric shift in ML (e.g., selecting the most appropriate dataset for a new project or better replicating other ML results). The DSL is implemented as a Visual Studio Code plugin, and it has been published under an open source license.

The Present and Future of Bots in Software Engineering

We are witnessing a massive adoption of software engineering bots, applications that react to events triggered by tools and messages posted by users and run automated tasks in response, in a variety of domains. This thematic issues describes experiences and challenges with these bots.