Improving Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Data Importance Learning

Retrieval augmentation enables large language models to take advantage of external knowledge, for example on tasks like question answering and data imputation. However, the performance of such retrieval-augmented models is limited by the data quality of their underlying retrieval corpus. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on multilinear extension for evaluating the data importance of retrieved data points. There are exponentially many terms in the multilinear extension, and one key contribution of this paper is a polynomial time algorithm that computes exactly, given a retrieval-augmented model with an additive utility function and a validation set, the data importance of data points in the retrieval corpus using the multilinear extension of the model's utility function. We further proposed an even more efficient ({\epsilon}, {\delta})-approximation algorithm. Our experimental results illustrate that we can enhance the performance of large language models by only pruning or reweighting the retrieval corpus, without requiring further training. For some tasks, this even allows a small model (e.g., GPT-JT), augmented with a search engine API, to outperform GPT-3.5 (without retrieval augmentation). Moreover, we show that weights based on multilinear extension can be computed efficiently in practice (e.g., in less than ten minutes for a corpus with 100 million elements)

Proactively Screening Machine Learning Pipelines with ARGUSEYES

Software systems that learn from data with machine learning (ML) are ubiquitous. ML pipelines in these applications often suffer from a variety of data-related issues, such as data leakage, label errors or fairness violations, which require reasoning about complex dependencies between their inputs and outputs. These issues are usually only detected in hindsight after deployment, after they caused harm in production. We demonstrate ArgusEyes, a system which enables data scientists to proactively screen their ML pipelines for data-related issues as part of continuous integration. ArgusEyes instruments, executes and screens ML pipelines for declaratively specified pipeline issues, and analyzes data artifacts and their provenance to catch potential problems early before deployment to production. We demonstrate our system for three scenarios: detecting mislabeled images in a computer vision pipeline, spotting data leakage in a price prediction pipeline, and addressing fairness violations in a credit scoring pipeline

How to Compliment a Human – Designing Affective and Well-being Promoting Conversational Things

With today’s technologies it seems easier than ever to augment everyday things with the ability to perceive their environment and to talk to users. Considering conversational user interfaces, tremendous progress has already been made in designing and evaluating task oriented conversational interfaces, such as voice assistants for ordering food, booking a flight etc. However, it is still very challenging to design smart things that can have with their users an informal conversation and emotional exchange, which requires the smart thing to master the usage of social everyday utterances, using irony and sarcasm, delivering good compliments, etc. In this paper, we focus on the experience design of compliments and the Complimenting Mirror design. The paper reports in detail on three phases of a human-centered design process including a Wizard of Oz study in the lab with 24 participants to explore and identify the effect of different compliment types on user experiences and a consequent field study with 105 users in an architecture museum with a fully functional installation of the Complimenting Mirror. In our analyses we argue why and how a “smart” mirror should compliment users and provide a theorization applicable for affective interaction design with things in more general. We focus on subjective user feedback including user concerns and prepositions of receiving compliments from a thing and on observations of real user behavior in the field i.e. transitions of bodily affective expressions comparing affective user states before, during, and after compliment delivery. Our research shows that compliment design matters significantly and using the right type of compliments in our final design in the field test, we succeed in achieving reactive expressions of positive emotions, “sincere” smiles and laughter, even from the seemingly sternest users. We conclude by providing an outlook of our contribution for the new age of large language models and prompt engineering