Self-Supervised Learning of Machine Ethics

In recent years Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially deep learning, has proven to be a technology driver in industry. However, while advancing existing and creating novel technologies, automatizing processes, and assisting humans in essential areas such as drug discovery, they raise many concerns, like other groundbreaking novel technologies before. In this case, these concerns include, for instance, models producing stereotypical and derogatory content as well as gender and racial biases. Since AI technologies will permeate more of our lives in the coming years, these concerns need to be addressed. This thesis examines recent data-driven approaches, which often suffer from degenerated and biased behavior through their self-supervised training on large-scale noisy web data, containing potential inappropriate data. While this is well-established, we will investigate and demonstrate the promises of deep models’ acquired knowledge and capabilities through the provision of this very particular potentially inappropriate data. Importantly, we present the first approaches for learning ethics from data. Our findings suggest that if we build an AI system that learns an improved representation of data and that is able to better understand and produce it, in the process, it will also acquire more accurate societal knowledge, in this case, historical cultural associations to make human-like "right" and "wrong" choices. Furthermore, based on these findings, we consequently ask the arguably "circular" question of whether a machine can help us mitigate their associated concerns. Importantly, we demonstrate the importance of their ability to distinguish between "right" and "wrong" and how utilizing them can mitigate associated risks surrounding large-scale models themselves. However, we also highlight the role of human-machine interaction to explore and reinforce AI systems’ properties, including their flaws and merits, and present how human feedback on explanations can align deep learning based models with our precepts. We present these algorithms and corresponding findings, providing important insights for the goal of putting human values into AI systems, which, summarized, may not be insurmountable in the long run

A Typology to Explore the Mitigation of Shortcut Behavior

As machine learning models become increasingly larger, trained weakly supervised on large, possibly uncurated data sets, it becomes increasingly important to establish mechanisms for inspecting, interacting, and revising models to mitigate learning shortcuts and guarantee their learned knowledge is aligned with human knowledge. The recently proposed XIL framework was developed for this purpose, and several such methods have been introduced, each with individual motivations and methodological details. In this work, we provide a unification of various XIL methods into a single typology by establishing a common set of basic modules. In doing so, we pave the way for a principled comparison of existing, but, importantly, also future XIL approaches. In addition, we discuss existing and introduce novel measures and benchmarks for evaluating the overall abilities of a XIL method. Given this extensive toolbox, including our typology, measures, and benchmarks, we finally compare several recent XIL methods methodologically and quantitatively. In our evaluations, all methods prove to revise a model successfully. However, we found remarkable differences in individual benchmark tasks, revealing valuable application-relevant aspects for integrating these benchmarks in developing future methods

Revision Transformers: Instructing Language Models to Change their Values

Current transformer language models (LM) are large-scale models with billions of parameters. They have been shown to provide high performances on a variety of tasks but are also prone to shortcut learning and bias. Addressing such incorrect model behavior via parameter adjustments is very costly. This is particularly problematic for updating dynamic concepts, such as moral values, which vary culturally or interpersonally. In this work, we question the current common practice of storing all information in the model parameters and propose the Revision Transformer (RiT) to facilitate easy model updating. The specific combination of a large-scale pre-trained LM that inherently but also diffusely encodes world knowledge with a clear-structured revision engine makes it possible to update the model's knowledge with little effort and the help of user interaction. We exemplify RiT on a moral dataset and simulate user feedback demonstrating strong performance in model revision even with small data. This way, users can easily design a model regarding their preferences, paving the way for more transparent AI models

Mitigating Inappropriateness in Image Generation: Can there be Value in Reflecting the World's Ugliness?

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality and text alignment and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Since they are highly data-driven, relying on billion-sized datasets randomly scraped from the web, they also reproduce inappropriate human behavior. Specifically, we demonstrate inappropriate degeneration on a large-scale for various generative text-to-image models, thus motivating the need for monitoring and moderating them at deployment. To this end, we evaluate mitigation strategies at inference to suppress the generation of inappropriate content. Our findings show that we can use models' representations of the world's ugliness to align them with human preferences

Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Models

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality and text alignment and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Since they are highly data-driven, relying on billion-sized datasets randomly scraped from the internet, they also suffer, as we demonstrate, from degenerated and biased human behavior. In turn, they may even reinforce such biases. To help combat these undesired side effects, we present safe latent diffusion (SLD). Specifically, to measure the inappropriate degeneration due to unfiltered and imbalanced training sets, we establish a novel image generation test bed-inappropriate image prompts (I2P)-containing dedicated, real-world image-to-text prompts covering concepts such as nudity and violence. As our exhaustive empirical evaluation demonstrates, the introduced SLD removes and suppresses inappropriate image parts during the diffusion process, with no additional training required and no adverse effect on overall image quality or text alignment.Comment: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 202

ILLUME: Rationalizing Vision-Language Models through Human Interactions

Bootstrapping from pre-trained language models has been proven to be an efficient approach for building vision-language models (VLM) for tasks such as image captioning or visual question answering. However, outputs of these models rarely align with user's rationales for specific answers. In order to improve this alignment and reinforce commonsense reasons, we propose a tuning paradigm based on human interactions with machine generated data. Our ILLUME executes the following loop: Given an image-question-answer prompt, the VLM samples multiple candidate rationales, and a human critic provides minimal feedback via preference selection, used for fine-tuning. This loop increases the training data and gradually carves out the VLM's rationalization capabilities that are aligned with human intend. Our exhaustive experiments demonstrate that ILLUME is competitive with standard supervised fine-tuning while using significantly fewer training data and only requiring minimal feedback

Language Models have a Moral Dimension

Artificial writing is permeating our lives due to recent advances in large-scale, transformer-based language models (LMs) such as BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others. Using them as pretrained models and fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended the state of the art for many NLP tasks and shown that they not only capture linguistic knowledge but also retain general knowledge implicitly present in the data. These and other successes are exciting. Unfortunately, LMs trained on unfiltered text corpora suffer from degenerate and biased behaviour. While this is well established, we show that recent improvements of LMs also store ethical and moral values of the society and actually bring a ``moral dimension'' to surface: the values are capture geometrically by a direction in the embedding space, reflecting well the agreement of phrases to social norms implicitly expressed in the training texts. This provides a path for attenuating or even preventing toxic degeneration in LMs. Since one can now rate the (non-)normativity of arbitrary phrases without explicitly training the LM for this task, the moral dimension can be used as ``moral compass'' guiding (even other) LMs towards producing normative text, as we will show