With the rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs), information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines and recommender systems, have undergone a significant paradigm shift. This evolution, while heralding new opportunities, introduces emerging challenges, particularly in terms of biases and unfairness, which may threaten the information ecosystem. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of existing works on emerging and pressing bias and unfairness issues in IR systems when the integration of LLMs. We first unify bias and unfairness issues as distribution mismatch problems, providing a groundwork for categorizing various mitigation strategies through distribution alignment. Subsequently, we systematically delve into the specific bias and unfairness issues arising from three critical stages of LLMs integration into IR systems: data collection, model development, and result evaluation. In doing so, we meticulously review and analyze recent literature, focusing on the definitions, characteristics, and corresponding mitigation strategies associated with these issues. Finally, we identify and highlight some open problems and challenges for future work, aiming to inspire researchers and stakeholders in the IR field and beyond to better understand and mitigate bias and unfairness issues of IR in this LLM era. We also consistently maintain a GitHub repository for the relevant papers and resources in this rising direction at //github.com/KID-22/LLM-IR-Bias-Fairness-Survey.
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive abilities for multimodal content comprehension and reasoning with proper prompting in zero- or few-shot settings. Despite the proliferation of interactive systems developed to support prompt engineering for LLMs across various tasks, most have primarily focused on textual or visual inputs, thus neglecting the complex interplay between modalities within multimodal inputs. This oversight hinders the development of effective prompts that guide model multimodal reasoning processes by fully exploiting the rich context provided by multiple modalities. In this paper, we present POEM, a visual analytics system to facilitate efficient prompt engineering for enhancing the multimodal reasoning performance of LLMs. The system enables users to explore the interaction patterns across modalities at varying levels of detail for a comprehensive understanding of the multimodal knowledge elicited by various prompts. Through diverse recommendations of demonstration examples and instructional principles, POEM supports users in iteratively crafting and refining prompts to better align and enhance model knowledge with human insights. The effectiveness and efficiency of our system are validated through two case studies and interviews with experts.
We propose to utilize an instruction-tuned large language model (LLM) for guiding the text generation process in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Modern large language models (LLMs) are adept at performing various text generation tasks through zero-shot learning, prompted with instructions designed for specific objectives. This paper explores the potential of LLMs to derive linguistic information that can facilitate text generation in end-to-end ASR models. Specifically, we instruct an LLM to correct grammatical errors in an ASR hypothesis and use the LLM-derived representations to refine the output further. The proposed model is built on the joint CTC and attention architecture, with the LLM serving as a front-end feature extractor for the decoder. The ASR hypothesis, subject to correction, is obtained from the encoder via CTC decoding and fed into the LLM along with a specific instruction. The decoder subsequently takes as input the LLM output to perform token predictions, combining acoustic information from the encoder and the powerful linguistic information provided by the LLM. Experimental results show that the proposed LLM-guided model achieves a relative gain of approximately 13\% in word error rates across major benchmarks.
Recently, video-language understanding has achieved great success through large-scale pre-training. However, data scarcity remains a prevailing challenge. This study quantitatively reveals an "impossible trinity" among data quantity, diversity, and quality in pre-training datasets. Recent efforts seek to refine large-scale, diverse ASR datasets compromised by low quality through synthetic annotations. These methods successfully leverage useful information in multimodal video content (frames, tags, ASR transcripts, etc.) to refine the original annotations. Nevertheless, they struggle to mitigate noise within synthetic annotations and lack scalability as the dataset size expands. To address these issues, we introduce the Video DataFlywheel framework, which iteratively refines video annotations with improved noise control methods. For iterative refinement, we first leverage a video-language model to generate synthetic annotations, resulting in a refined dataset. Then, we pre-train on it and fine-tune on human refinement examples for a stronger model. These processes are repeated for continuous improvement. For noise control, we present AdaTaiLr, a novel noise control method that requires weaker assumptions on noise distribution, thereby proving more effective in large datasets with theoretical guarantees. The combination of iterative refinement and AdaTaiLr can achieve better scalability in video-language understanding. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing data refinement baselines, delivering a 3% performance boost and improving dataset quality with minimal diversity loss. Furthermore, our refined dataset facilitates significant improvements in various video-language understanding tasks, including video question answering and text-video retrieval.
Mixed Reality (MR) platforms enable users to interact with three-dimensional holographic instructions during the assembly and fabrication of highly custom and parametric architectural constructions without the necessity of two-dimensional drawings. Previous MR fabrication projects have primarily relied on digital menus and custom buttons as the interface for user interaction with the MR environment. Despite this approach being widely adopted, it is limited in its ability to allow for direct human interaction with physical objects to modify fabrication instructions within the MR environment. This research integrates user interactions with physical objects through real-time gesture recognition as input to modify, update or generate new digital information enabling reciprocal stimuli between the physical and the virtual environment. Consequently, the digital environment is generative of the user's provided interaction with physical objects to allow seamless feedback in the fabrication process. This research investigates gesture recognition for feedback-based MR workflows for robotic fabrication, human assembly, and quality control in the construction of the UnLog Tower.
Recently, there has been a significant upsurge of interest in leveraging large language models (LLMs) to assist scientific discovery. However, most LLMs only focus on general science, while they lack domain-specific knowledge, such as chemical molecules and amino acid sequences. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciDFM, a mixture-of-experts LLM, which is trained from scratch and is able to conduct college-level scientific reasoning and understand molecules and amino acid sequences. We collect a large-scale training corpus containing numerous scientific papers and books from different disciplines as well as data from domain-specific databases. We further fine-tune the pre-trained model on lots of instruction data to improve performances on downstream benchmarks. From experiment results, we show that SciDFM achieves strong performance on general scientific benchmarks such as SciEval and SciQ, and it reaches a SOTA performance on domain-specific benchmarks among models of similar size. We further analyze the expert layers and show that the results of expert selection vary with data from different disciplines. To benefit the broader research community, we open-source SciDFM at //huggingface.co/OpenDFM/SciDFM-MoE-A5.6B-v1.0.
Recommender systems remain underutilized in humanities and historical research, despite their potential to enhance the discovery of cultural records. This paper offers an initial value identification of the multiple stakeholders that might be impacted by recommendations in Monasterium.net, a digital archive for historical legal documents. Specifically, we discuss the diverse values and objectives of its stakeholders, such as editors, aggregators, platform owners, researchers, publishers, and funding agencies. These in-depth insights into the potentially conflicting values of stakeholder groups allow designing and adapting recommender systems to enhance their usefulness for humanities and historical research. Additionally, our findings will support deeper engagement with additional stakeholders to refine value models and evaluation metrics for recommender systems in the given domains. Our conclusions are embedded in and applicable to other digital archives and a broader cultural heritage context.
In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored, particularly whether transformers can be trained to generalize to unseen examples in a prompt, which will require the model to acquire contextual knowledge of the prompt for generalization. This paper investigates the training dynamics of transformers by gradient descent through the lens of non-linear regression tasks. The contextual generalization here can be attained via learning the template function for each task in-context, where all template functions lie in a linear space with $m$ basis functions. We analyze the training dynamics of one-layer multi-head transformers to in-contextly predict unlabeled inputs given partially labeled prompts, where the labels contain Gaussian noise and the number of examples in each prompt are not sufficient to determine the template. Under mild assumptions, we show that the training loss for a one-layer multi-head transformer converges linearly to a global minimum. Moreover, the transformer effectively learns to perform ridge regression over the basis functions. To our knowledge, this study is the first provable demonstration that transformers can learn contextual (i.e., template) information to generalize to both unseen examples and tasks when prompts contain only a small number of query-answer pairs.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.