18 accepted papers
Ensuring the safety of Generative AI requires a nuanced understanding of pluralistic viewpoints. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-driven approach for analyzing ordinal safety ratings in pluralistic settings. Specifically, we address the challenge of interpreting nuanced differences in safety…
The tendency of users to anthropomorphise large language models (LLMs) is of growing societal interest. Here, we present AnthroBench: a novel empirical method and tool for evaluating anthropomorphic LLM behaviours in realistic settings. Our work introduces three key advances; first, we develop a mul…
How do multi-modal generative models describe images of recent historical events and figures, whose legacies may be nuanced, multifaceted, or contested? This task necessitates not only accurate visual recognition, but also socio-cultural knowledge and cross-modal reasoning. To address this evaluati…
The increasing ubiquity of text-to-image (T2I) models as tools for visual content generation raises concerns about their ability to accurately represent diverse cultural contexts - where missed cues can stereotype communities and undermine usability. In this work, we present the first study to syste
Modelling human variation in rating tasks is crucial for enabling AI systems for personalization, pluralistic model alignment, and computational social science. We propose representing individuals using value profiles – natural language descriptions of underlying values compressed from in-context de
Current text-to-image (T2I) models often fail to account for diverse human experiences, leading to misaligned systems. We advocate for pluralism in AI alignment, where an AI understands and is steerable towards diverse, and often conflicting, human values. Our work provides three core contributions…
This research introduces STAR, a sociotechnical framework that improves on current best practices for red teaming safety of large language models. STAR makes two key contributions: it enhances steerability by generating parameterised instructions for human red teamers, leading to improved coverage o…
Adversarial robustness evaluates the worst-case performance scenario of a machine learning model to ensure its safety and reliability. For example, cases where the user input contains a minimal change, e.g. a synonym, which causes the previously correct model to return a wrong answer. Using this sce…
Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism is inevitable, conscious and unconscious design choices can guide users to personify them to varying degrees. Encouraging users to relate to automated systems…
Interactive and embodied tasks pose at least two fundamental challenges to existing Vision \& Language (VL) models, including 1) grounding language in trajectories of actions and observations, and 2) referential disambiguation. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Embodied MultiModal Agent (EMM…
Automated image captioning has the potential to be a useful tool for people with vision impairments. Images taken by this user group are often noisy, which leads to incorrect and even unsafe model predictions. In this paper, we propose a quality-agnostic framework to improve the performance and rob…
Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. “unfaithful” with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors,…
The social impact of natural language processing and its applications has received increasing attention. In this position paper, we focus on the problem of safety for end-to-end conversational AI. We survey the problem landscape therein, introducing a taxonomy of three observed phenomena: the Instig…
We present AggGen (pronounced ‘again’) a data-to-text model which re-introduces two explicit sentence planning stages into neural data-to-text systems: input ordering and input aggregation. In contrast to previous work using sentence planning, our model is still end-to-end: AggGen performs sentence…
We present the first English corpus study on abusive language towards three conversational AI systems gathered ‘in the wild’: an open-domain social bot, a rule-based chatbot, and a task-based system. To account for the complexity of the task, we take a more ‘nuanced’ approach where our ConvAI datase…
One of the most challenging aspects of current single-document news summarization is that the summary often contains ‘extrinsic hallucinations’, i.e., facts that are not present in the source document, which are often derived via world knowledge. This causes summarisation systems to act more like op…
Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a “bridging” utterance connecting the new topic to t…
Previous work has shown that human evaluations in NLP are notoriously under-powered. Here, we argue that there are two common factors which make this problem even worse: NLP studies usually (a) treat ordinal data as interval data and (b) operate under high variance settings while the differences the…