Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October
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NL Seminar -On formulating and evaluating language agents
Thu, Oct 05, 2023 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shunyu Yao, Princeton University
Talk Title: On formulating and evaluating language agents
Abstract: REMINDER:
Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you are highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom.
If you are an outside visitor, please inform us at nlg DASH seminar DASH host AT isi DOT edu beforehand so we will be aware of your attendance and let you in.
Language agents are AI systems that use large language models LLMs to interact with the world. While various methods have been developed, it is often hard to systematically understand or evaluate them. In this talk, we present Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents CoALA, a theoretical framework grounded in the classical research of cognitive architectures to make sense of existing agents and shed light into future directions. We also present three benchmarks WebShop, InterCode, Collie to develop and evaluate language agents using web, code, and grammar respectively. Notably, all three are scalable and practical, with simple and faithful evaluation metrics that do not rely on human preference labeling or LLM scoring.
Biography: Shunyu Yao is a final year Phd student with Karthik Narasimhan at Princeton NLP Group. His research focuses on language agents, and is supported by the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship from Princeton.
Host: Jon May and Justin Cho
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/p6wSLDZat1wLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual and ISI-Conf Rm#689
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/p6wSLDZat1w
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Pete Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar -Interactive AI Systems Specialized in Social Influence
Thu, Oct 19, 2023 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Weiyan Shi, Post Doc Stanford University
Talk Title: Interactive AI Systems Specialized in Social Influence
Abstract: REMINDER: Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you are highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you are an outside visitor, please inform us at nlg DASH seminar DASH host AT isi DOT edu beforehand so we will be aware of your attendance and let you in. In-person attendance will be permitted for USC/ISI faculty, staff, students only. Open to the public virtually via the zoom link. AI research has so far focused on modeling common human skills, such as building systems to see, read, or talk. As these systems gradually achieve a human level in standard benchmarks, it is increasingly important to develop next generation interactive AI systems with more advanced human skills, to function in realistic and critical applications such as providing personalized emotional support. In this talk, I will cover 1. how to build such expert like AI systems specialized in social influence that can persuade, negotiate, and cooperate with other humans during conversations. 2. I will also discuss how humans perceive such specialized AI systems. This study validates the necessity of Autobot Law and proposes guidance to regulate such systems.3. As these systems become more powerful, they are also more prone to leak users private information. So I will describe our proposed new privacy notion, Selective Differential Privacy, and an algorithm to train privacy preserving models with high utilities. Finally, I will conclude with my longterm vision to build a natural interface between human intelligence and machine intelligence via dialogues, from a multi angle approach that combines Artificial Intelligence, Human Computer Interaction, and social sciences, to develop expert AI systems for everyone.
Biography: Weiyan Shi is a postdoc at Stanford NLP and an incoming assistant professor at Northeastern University starting in 2024. Her research interests are in Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially in social influence dialogue systems such as persuasion, negotiation, and recommendation. She has also worked on privacy preserving NLP applications. She is recognized as a Rising Star in Machine Learning by the University of Maryland. Her work on personalized persuasive dialogue systems was nominated for ACL 2019 best paper. She was also a core team member behind a Science publication on the first negotiation AI agent, Cicero, that achieves a human level in the game of Diplomacy. This work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, Forbes, and other major media outlets.
Host: Jon May and Justin Cho
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual and ISI-Conf Rm#689
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Pete Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Design Criteria for Human-Centered Natural Language Generation
Thu, Oct 26, 2023 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kaitlyn Zhou, Stanford University
Talk Title: Design Criteria for Human-Centered Natural Language Generation
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: Abstract: REMINDER: Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you are highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you are an outside visitor, please inform us at nlg DASH seminar DASH host AT isi DOT edu beforehand so we will be aware of your attendance and let you in. In-person attendance will be permitted for USC/ISI faculty, staff, students only. Open to the public virtually via the zoom link. Large language models have made substantial steps towards generating human-like language. However, this endeavor to mimic human language comes with potential drawbacks. By mimicking and appropriating human language, the systems produce language that inherits the harms and cognitive biases of humans while failing to ensure features like clarity and transparency. My research asks: how can generated language avoid the harms of natural language while supporting safe and collaborative human-AI collaboration? Starting with the researchers, I study the quality criteria of natural language generation, using mixed methods approaches to reveal design decisions made consciously and subconsciously by natural language generation by practitioners. Looking through datasets of natural language, I identify the origins of language appropriation and illustrate the safety risks mimicry has via the linguistic miscalibration of language models. Lastly, I study how humans perceive the appropriation of social behaviors such as politeness and refusal and the risks they may pose in chat settings. What I find throughout my research is that language models inappropriately appropriate the style, the use of linguistic cues, and the prosocial language of the human text they are trained on. My future work seeks to develop design criteria for generated language, centered on user-needs, to build training methods to achieve this goal.
Biography: Kaitlyn Zhou is currently pursuing her PhD in computer science at Stanford University, advised by Dan Jurafsky. Her research focuses on investigating the unintended consequences that stem from the appropriation of natural language by language models. Her work delves into various aspects, including the fairness implications associated with the evaluation of natural language generation, the linguistic miscalibration displayed by language models, and the misplaced overconfidence of publicly deployed chatbots. Kaitlyn has previously spent summers at Microsoft Research and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She is funded by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and her visualization techniques have gained recognition in prominent publications like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In 2018, Kaitlyn was appointed by Washington State Governor Jay Inslee to the University of Washington Board of Regents.
Host: Jon May and Justin Cho
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/bJC6PFxU99sLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual and ISI-Conf Rm#689
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/bJC6PFxU99s
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Pete Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
