This paper presents a comprehensive survey of work on sociodemographic bias in language models (LMs). Sociodemographic biases embedded within language models can have harmful effects when deployed in real-world settings. We systematically organize the existing literature into three main areas: types of bias, quantifying bias, and debiasing techniques. We also track the evolution of investigations of LM bias over the past decade. We identify current trends, limitations, and potential future directions in bias research. To guide future research towards more effective and reliable solutions, we present a checklist of open questions. We also recommend using interdisciplinary approaches to combine works on LM bias with an understanding of the potential harms.
In the rapidly advancing field of AI and NLP, generative large language models (LLMs) stand at the forefront of innovation, showcasing unparalleled abilities in text understanding and generation. However, the limited representation of low-resource languages like Ukrainian poses a notable challenge, restricting the reach and relevance of this technology. Our paper addresses this by fine-tuning the open-source Gemma and Mistral LLMs with Ukrainian datasets, aiming to improve their linguistic proficiency and benchmarking them against other existing models capable of processing Ukrainian language. This endeavor not only aims to mitigate language bias in technology but also promotes inclusivity in the digital realm. Our transparent and reproducible approach encourages further NLP research and development. Additionally, we present the Ukrainian Knowledge and Instruction Dataset (UKID) to aid future efforts in language model fine-tuning. Our research not only advances the field of NLP but also highlights the importance of linguistic diversity in AI, which is crucial for cultural preservation, education, and expanding AI's global utility. Ultimately, we advocate for a future where technology is inclusive, enabling AI to communicate effectively across all languages, especially those currently underrepresented.
We present a survey of 39 recent papers that aim to study cultural representation and inclusion in large language models. We observe that none of the studies define "culture," which is a complex, multifaceted concept; instead, they probe the models on some specially designed datasets which represent certain aspects of "culture." We call these aspects the proxies of cultures, and organize them across three dimensions of demographic, semantic and linguistic-cultural interaction proxies. We also categorize the probing methods employed. Our analysis indicates that only certain aspects of "culture," such as values and objectives, have been studied, leaving several other interesting and important facets, especially the multitude of semantic domains (Thompson et al., 2020) and aboutness (Hershcovich et al., 2022), unexplored. Two other crucial gaps are the lack of robustness and situatedness of the current methods. Based on these observations, we provide several recommendations for a holistic and practically useful research agenda for furthering cultural inclusion in LLMs and LLM-based applications.
Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and federated learning (FL) in smart transportation has raised critical issues regarding their responsible use. Ensuring responsible AI is paramount for the stability and sustainability of intelligent transportation systems. Despite its importance, research on the responsible application of AI and FL in this domain remains nascent, with a paucity of in-depth investigations into their confluence. Our study analyzes the roles of FL in smart transportation, as well as the promoting effect of responsible AI on distributed smart transportation. Lastly, we discuss the challenges of developing and implementing responsible FL in smart transportation and propose potential solutions. By integrating responsible AI and federated learning, intelligent transportation systems are expected to achieve a higher degree of intelligence, personalization, safety, and transparency.
Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast datasets, can carry biases that manifest in various forms, from overt discrimination to implicit stereotypes. One facet of bias is performance disparities in LLMs, often harming underprivileged groups, such as racial minorities. A common approach to quantifying bias is to use template-based bias probes, which explicitly state group membership (e.g. White) and evaluate if the outcome of a task, sentiment analysis for instance, is invariant to the change of group membership (e.g. change White race to Black). This approach is widely used in bias quantification. However, in this work, we find evidence of an unexpectedly overlooked consequence of using template-based probes for LLM bias quantification. We find that in doing so, text examples associated with White ethnicities appear to be classified as exhibiting negative sentiment at elevated rates. We hypothesize that the scenario arises artificially through a mismatch between the pre-training text of LLMs and the templates used to measure bias through reporting bias, unstated norms that imply group membership without explicit statement. Our finding highlights the potential misleading impact of varying group membership through explicit mention in bias quantification
This paper reveals the phenomenon of parameter heterogeneity in large language models (LLMs). We find that a small subset of ``cherry'' parameters exhibit a disproportionately large influence on model performance, while the vast majority of parameters have minimal impact. This heterogeneity is found to be prevalent across different model families, scales, and types. Motivated by this observation, we propose CherryQ, a novel quantization method that unifies the optimization of mixed-precision parameters. CherryQ identifies and preserves the critical cherry parameters in high precision while aggressively quantizing the remaining parameters to low precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CherryQ. CherryQ outperforms existing quantization approaches in terms of perplexity and downstream task performance. Notably, our 3-bit quantized Vicuna-1.5 exhibits competitive performance compared to their 16-bit counterparts. These findings highlight the potential of CherryQ for enabling efficient deployment of LLMs by taking advantage of parameter heterogeneity.
Evaluating and enhancing the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has been an important research topic. Graph is a common data structure in the real world, and understanding graph data is a crucial part for advancing general intelligence. To evaluate and enhance the graph understanding abilities of LLMs, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named GraphInstruct, which comprehensively includes 21 classical graph reasoning tasks, providing diverse graph generation pipelines and detailed reasoning steps. Based on GraphInstruct, we further construct GraphLM through efficient instruction-tuning, which shows prominent graph understanding capability. In order to enhance the LLM with graph reasoning capability as well, we propose a step mask training strategy, and construct a model named GraphLM+. As one of the pioneering efforts to enhance the graph understanding and reasoning abilities of LLMs, extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of GraphLM and GraphLM+ over other LLMs. We look forward to more researchers exploring the potential of LLMs in the graph data mining domain through GraphInstruct. Our code for generating GraphInstruct is released publicly at: //github.com/CGCL-codes/GraphInstruct.
This paper explores the evolving relationship between clinician trust in LLMs, the transformation of data sources from predominantly human-generated to AI-generated content, and the subsequent impact on the precision of LLMs and clinician competence. One of the primary concerns identified is the potential feedback loop that arises as LLMs become more reliant on their outputs for learning, which may lead to a degradation in output quality and a reduction in clinician skills due to decreased engagement with fundamental diagnostic processes. While theoretical at this stage, this feedback loop poses a significant challenge as the integration of LLMs in healthcare deepens, emphasizing the need for proactive dialogue and strategic measures to ensure the safe and effective use of LLM technology. A key takeaway from our investigation is the critical role of user expertise and the necessity for a discerning approach to trusting and validating LLM outputs. The paper highlights how expert users, particularly clinicians, can leverage LLMs to enhance productivity by offloading routine tasks while maintaining a critical oversight to identify and correct potential inaccuracies in AI-generated content. This balance of trust and skepticism is vital for ensuring that LLMs augment rather than undermine the quality of patient care. Moreover, we delve into the potential risks associated with LLMs' self-referential learning loops and the deskilling of healthcare professionals. The risk of LLMs operating within an echo chamber, where AI-generated content feeds into the learning algorithms, threatens the diversity and quality of the data pool, potentially entrenching biases and reducing the efficacy of LLMs.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.