Persuasion with Large Language Models: a Survey

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new disruptive possibilities for persuasive communication, by enabling fully-automated personalized and interactive content generation at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we survey the research field of LLM-based persuasion that has emerged as a result. We begin by exploring the different modes in which LLM Systems are used to influence human attitudes and behaviors. In areas such as politics, marketing, public health, e-commerce, and charitable giving, such LLM Systems have already achieved human-level or even super-human persuasiveness. We identify key factors influencing their effectiveness, such as the manner of personalization and whether the content is labelled as AI-generated. We also summarize the experimental designs that have been used to evaluate progress. Our survey suggests that the current and future potential of LLM-based persuasion poses profound ethical and societal risks, including the spread of misinformation, the magnification of biases, and the invasion of privacy. These risks underscore the urgent need for ethical guidelines and updated regulatory frameworks to avoid the widespread deployment of irresponsible and harmful LLM Systems.

Large Language Models Reflect the Ideology of their Creators

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data to generate natural language, enabling them to perform tasks like text summarization and question answering. These models have become popular in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT and already play an influential role in how humans access information. However, the behavior of LLMs varies depending on their design, training, and use. In this paper, we uncover notable diversity in the ideological stance exhibited across different LLMs and languages in which they are accessed. We do this by prompting a diverse panel of popular LLMs to describe a large number of prominent and controversial personalities from recent world history, both in English and in Chinese. By identifying and analyzing moral assessments reflected in the generated descriptions, we find consistent normative differences between how the same LLM responds in Chinese compared to English. Similarly, we identify normative disagreements between Western and non-Western LLMs about prominent actors in geopolitical conflicts. Furthermore, popularly hypothesized disparities in political goals among Western models are reflected in significant normative differences related to inclusion, social inequality, and political scandals. Our results show that the ideological stance of an LLM often reflects the worldview of its creators. This raises important concerns around technological and regulatory efforts with the stated aim of making LLMs ideologically `unbiased', and it poses risks for political instrumentalization.

ABCFair: an Adaptable Benchmark approach for Comparing Fairness Methods

Numerous methods have been implemented that pursue fairness with respect to sensitive features by mitigating biases in machine learning. Yet, the problem settings that each method tackles vary significantly, including the stage of intervention, the composition of sensitive features, the fairness notion, and the distribution of the output. Even in binary classification, these subtle differences make it highly complicated to benchmark fairness methods, as their performance can strongly depend on exactly how the bias mitigation problem was originally framed. Hence, we introduce ABCFair, a benchmark approach which allows adapting to the desiderata of the real-world problem setting, enabling proper comparability between methods for any use case. We apply ABCFair to a range of pre-, in-, and postprocessing methods on both large-scale, traditional datasets and on a dual label (biased and unbiased) dataset to sidestep the fairness-accuracy trade-off.

Exploring the Performance of Continuous-Time Dynamic Link Prediction Algorithms

Dynamic Link Prediction (DLP) addresses the prediction of future links in evolving networks. However, accurately portraying the performance of DLP algorithms poses challenges that might impede progress in the field. Importantly, common evaluation pipelines usually calculate ranking or binary classification metrics, where the scores of observed interactions (positives) are compared with those of randomly generated ones (negatives). However, a single metric is not sufficient to fully capture the differences between DLP algorithms, and is prone to overly optimistic performance evaluation. Instead, an in-depth evaluation should reflect performance variations across different nodes, edges, and time segments. In this work, we contribute tools to perform such a comprehensive evaluation. (1) We propose Birth-Death diagrams, a simple but powerful visualization technique that illustrates the effect of time-based train-test splitting on the difficulty of DLP on a given dataset. (2) We describe an exhaustive taxonomy of negative sampling methods that can be used at evaluation time. (3) We carry out an empirical study of the effect of the different negative sampling strategies. Our comparison between heuristics and state-of-the-art memory-based methods on various real-world datasets confirms a strong effect of using different negative sampling strategies on the test Area Under the Curve (AUC). Moreover, we conduct a visual exploration of the prediction, with additional insights on which different types of errors are prominent over time.

KamerRaad: Enhancing Information Retrieval in Belgian National Politics through Hierarchical Summarization and Conversational Interfaces

KamerRaad is an AI tool that leverages large language models to help citizens interactively engage with Belgian political information. The tool extracts and concisely summarizes key excerpts from parliamentary proceedings, followed by the potential for interaction based on generative AI that allows users to steadily build up their understanding. KamerRaad's front-end, built with Streamlit, facilitates easy interaction, while the back-end employs open-source models for text embedding and generation to ensure accurate and relevant responses. By collecting feedback, we intend to enhance the relevancy of our source retrieval and the quality of our summarization, thereby enriching the user experience with a focus on source-driven dialogue.

fairret: a Framework for Differentiable Fairness Regularization Terms

Current tools for machine learning fairness only admit a limited range of fairness definitions and have seen little integration with automatic differentiation libraries, despite the central role these libraries play in modern machine learning pipelines. We introduce a framework of fairness regularization terms (fairrets) which quantify bias as modular objectives that are easily integrated in automatic differentiation pipelines. By employing a general definition of fairness in terms of linear-fractional statistics, a wide class of fairrets can be computed efficiently. Experiments show the behavior of their gradients and their utility in enforcing fairness with minimal loss of predictive power compared to baselines. Our contribution includes a PyTorch implementation of the fairret framework.

RankFormer: Listwise Learning-to-Rank Using Listwide Labels

Web applications where users are presented with a limited selection of items have long employed ranking models to put the most relevant results first. Any feedback received from users is typically assumed to reflect a relative judgement on the utility of items, e.g. a user clicking on an item only implies it is better than items not clicked in the same ranked list. Hence, the objectives optimized in Learning-to-Rank (LTR) tend to be pairwise or listwise. Yet, by only viewing feedback as relative, we neglect the user's absolute feedback on the list's overall quality, e.g. when no items in the selection are clicked. We thus reconsider the standard LTR paradigm and argue the benefits of learning from this listwide signal. To this end, we propose the RankFormer as an architecture that, with a Transformer at its core, can jointly optimize a novel listwide assessment objective and a traditional listwise LTR objective. We simulate implicit feedback on public datasets and observe that the RankFormer succeeds in benefitting from listwide signals. Additionally, we conduct experiments in e-commerce on Amazon Search data and find the RankFormer to be superior to all baselines offline. An online experiment shows that knowledge distillation can be used to find immediate practical use for the RankFormer.

Optimal Transport of Binary Classifiers to Fairness

Much of the past work on fairness in machine learning has focused on forcing the predictions of classifiers to have similar statistical properties for individuals of different demographics. Yet, such methods often simply perform a rescaling of the classifier scores and ignore whether individuals of different groups have similar features. Our proposed method, Optimal Transport to Fairness (OTF), applies Optimal Transport (OT) to take this similarity into account by quantifying unfairness as the smallest cost of OT between a classifier and any score function that satisfies fairness constraints. For a flexible class of linear fairness constraints, we show a practical way to compute OTF as an unfairness cost term that can be added to any standard classification setting. Experiments show that OTF can be used to achieve an effective trade-off between predictive power and fairness.

The KL-Divergence between a Graph Model and its Fair I-Projection as a Fairness Regularizer

Learning and reasoning over graphs is increasingly done by means of probabilistic models, e.g. exponential random graph models, graph embedding models, and graph neural networks. When graphs are modeling relations between people, however, they will inevitably reflect biases, prejudices, and other forms of inequity and inequality. An important challenge is thus to design accurate graph modeling approaches while guaranteeing fairness according to the specific notion of fairness that the problem requires. Yet, past work on the topic remains scarce, is limited to debiasing specific graph modeling methods, and often aims to ensure fairness in an indirect manner. We propose a generic approach applicable to most probabilistic graph modeling approaches. Specifically, we first define the class of fair graph models corresponding to a chosen set of fairness criteria. Given this, we propose a fairness regularizer defined as the KL-divergence between the graph model and its I-projection onto the set of fair models. We demonstrate that using this fairness regularizer in combination with existing graph modeling approaches efficiently trades-off fairness with accuracy, whereas the state-of-the-art models can only make this trade-off for the fairness criterion that they were specifically designed for.

DeBayes: a Bayesian method for debiasing network embeddings

As machine learning algorithms are increasingly deployed for high-impact automated decision making, ethical and increasingly also legal standards demand that they treat all individuals fairly, without discrimination based on their age, gender, race or other sensitive traits. In recent years much progress has been made on ensuring fairness and reducing bias in standard machine learning settings. Yet, for network embedding, with applications in vulnerable domains ranging from social network analysis to recommender systems, current options remain limited both in number and performance. We thus propose DeBayes: a conceptually elegant Bayesian method that is capable of learning debiased embeddings by using a biased prior. Our experiments show that these representations can then be used to perform link prediction that is significantly more fair in terms of popular metrics such as demographic parity and equalized opportunity.