Parachute: Evaluating Interactive Human-LM Co-writing Systems

A surge of advances in language models (LMs) has led to significant interest in using LMs to build co-writing systems, in which humans and LMs interactively contribute to a shared writing artifact. However, there is a lack of studies assessing co-writing systems in interactive settings. We propose a human-centered evaluation framework, Parachute, for interactive co-writing systems. Parachute showcases an integrative view of interaction evaluation, where each evaluation aspect consists of categorized practical metrics. Furthermore, we present Parachute with a use case to demonstrate how to evaluate and compare co-writing systems using Parachute.Comment: Accepted by CHI'23 In2Writing Worksho

Is AI the better programming partner? Human-Human Pair Programming vs. Human-AI pAIr Programming

The emergence of large-language models (LLMs) that excel at code generation and commercial products such as GitHub's Copilot has sparked interest in human-AI pair programming (referred to as "pAIr programming") where an AI system collaborates with a human programmer. While traditional pair programming between humans has been extensively studied, it remains uncertain whether its findings can be applied to human-AI pair programming. We compare human-human and human-AI pair programming, exploring their similarities and differences in interaction, measures, benefits, and challenges. We find that the effectiveness of both approaches is mixed in the literature (though the measures used for pAIr programming are not as comprehensive). We summarize moderating factors on the success of human-human pair programming, which provides opportunities for pAIr programming research. For example, mismatched expertise makes pair programming less productive, therefore well-designed AI programming assistants may adapt to differences in expertise levels.Comment: 8 pages (without references), 2 table

Synergi: A Mixed-Initiative System for Scholarly Synthesis and Sensemaking

Efficiently reviewing scholarly literature and synthesizing prior art are crucial for scientific progress. Yet, the growing scale of publications and the burden of knowledge make synthesis of research threads more challenging than ever. While significant research has been devoted to helping scholars interact with individual papers, building research threads scattered across multiple papers remains a challenge. Most top-down synthesis (and LLMs) make it difficult to personalize and iterate on the output, while bottom-up synthesis is costly in time and effort. Here, we explore a new design space of mixed-initiative workflows. In doing so we develop a novel computational pipeline, Synergi, that ties together user input of relevant seed threads with citation graphs and LLMs, to expand and structure them, respectively. Synergi allows scholars to start with an entire threads-and-subthreads structure generated from papers relevant to their interests, and to iterate and customize on it as they wish. In our evaluation, we find that Synergi helps scholars efficiently make sense of relevant threads, broaden their perspectives, and increases their curiosity. We discuss future design implications for thread-based, mixed-initiative scholarly synthesis support tools.Comment: ACM UIST'2

ScatterShot: Interactive In-context Example Curation for Text Transformation

The in-context learning capabilities of LLMs like GPT-3 allow annotators to customize an LLM to their specific tasks with a small number of examples. However, users tend to include only the most obvious patterns when crafting examples, resulting in underspecified in-context functions that fall short on unseen cases. Further, it is hard to know when "enough" examples have been included even for known patterns. In this work, we present ScatterShot, an interactive system for building high-quality demonstration sets for in-context learning. ScatterShot iteratively slices unlabeled data into task-specific patterns, samples informative inputs from underexplored or not-yet-saturated slices in an active learning manner, and helps users label more efficiently with the help of an LLM and the current example set. In simulation studies on two text perturbation scenarios, ScatterShot sampling improves the resulting few-shot functions by 4-5 percentage points over random sampling, with less variance as more examples are added. In a user study, ScatterShot greatly helps users in covering different patterns in the input space and labeling in-context examples more efficiently, resulting in better in-context learning and less user effort.Comment: IUI 2023: 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interface

Providing Suggestions of Expanded Text from Abbreviated Text Input

This disclosure describes techniques to provide suggestions of expanded text from abbreviated or compressed text that has been input by a user. A language model is used to determine and present the most likely full words and phrases that match user intent based on the user’s abbreviated text input, such as the first letter of each word of a phrase and/or omission of one or more words of the phrase. The described techniques can greatly improve speed of text entry to devices via a keyboard or other input modality

Large Language Models Help Humans Verify Truthfulness -- Except When They Are Convincingly Wrong

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for accessing information on the web. Their truthfulness and factuality are thus of great interest. To help users make the right decisions about the information they're getting, LLMs should not only provide but also help users fact-check information. In this paper, we conduct experiments with 80 crowdworkers in total to compare language models with search engines (information retrieval systems) at facilitating fact-checking by human users. We prompt LLMs to validate a given claim and provide corresponding explanations. Users reading LLM explanations are significantly more efficient than using search engines with similar accuracy. However, they tend to over-rely the LLMs when the explanation is wrong. To reduce over-reliance on LLMs, we ask LLMs to provide contrastive information - explain both why the claim is true and false, and then we present both sides of the explanation to users. This contrastive explanation mitigates users' over-reliance on LLMs, but cannot significantly outperform search engines. However, showing both search engine results and LLM explanations offers no complementary benefits as compared to search engines alone. Taken together, natural language explanations by LLMs may not be a reliable replacement for reading the retrieved passages yet, especially in high-stakes settings where over-relying on wrong AI explanations could lead to critical consequences.Comment: preprin

Bridging the Gap: A Survey on Integrating (Human) Feedback for Natural Language Generation

Many recent advances in natural language generation have been fueled by training large language models on internet-scale data. However, this paradigm can lead to models that generate toxic, inaccurate, and unhelpful content, and automatic evaluation metrics often fail to identify these behaviors. As models become more capable, human feedback is an invaluable signal for evaluating and improving models. This survey aims to provide an overview of the recent research that has leveraged human feedback to improve natural language generation. First, we introduce an encompassing formalization of feedback, and identify and organize existing research into a taxonomy following this formalization. Next, we discuss how feedback can be described by its format and objective, and cover the two approaches proposed to use feedback (either for training or decoding): directly using the feedback or training feedback models. We also discuss existing datasets for human-feedback data collection, and concerns surrounding feedback collection. Finally, we provide an overview of the nascent field of AI feedback, which exploits large language models to make judgments based on a set of principles and minimize the need for human intervention.Comment: Work in Progres