Recent work in large language modeling (LLMs) has used fine-tuning to align outputs with the preferences of a prototypical user. This work assumes that human preferences are static and homogeneous across individuals, so that aligning to a a single "generic" user will confer more general alignment. Here, we embrace the heterogeneity of human preferences to consider a different challenge: how might a machine help people with diverse views find agreement? We fine-tune a 70 billion parameter LLM to generate statements that maximize the expected approval for a group of people with potentially diverse opinions. Human participants provide written opinions on thousands of questions touching on moral and political issues (e.g., "should we raise taxes on the rich?"), and rate the LLM's generated candidate consensus statements for agreement and quality. A reward model is then trained to predict individual preferences, enabling it to quantify and rank consensus statements in terms of their appeal to the overall group, defined according to different aggregation (social welfare) functions. The model produces consensus statements that are preferred by human users over those from prompted LLMs (>70%) and significantly outperforms a tight fine-tuned baseline that lacks the final ranking step. Further, our best model's consensus statements are preferred over the best human-generated opinions (>65%). We find that when we silently constructed consensus statements from only a subset of group members, those who were excluded were more likely to dissent, revealing the sensitivity of the consensus to individual contributions. These results highlight the potential to use LLMs to help groups of humans align their values with one another.

我们介绍了Sparrow，这是一个寻求信息的对话代理，与提示的语言模型基线相比，训练有素，更有帮助，正确和无害。我们使用从人类反馈中的强化学习来培训我们的模型，以帮助人类评估者判断代理人的行为。首先，为了使我们的代理人更有帮助和无害，我们将良好对话的要求分解为代理人应遵循的自然语言规则，并分别向评估者询问每个规则。我们证明，这种崩溃使我们能够收集对代理行为的更多针对性的人类判断，并允许更有效的规则条件奖励模型。其次，我们的代理商在收集对模型声明的偏好判决时提供了支持事实主张的来源的证据。对于事实问题，麻雀提供的证据支持了78％的时间。比基线比基线更享受麻雀，同时对人类的对抗性探测更具弹性，在探测时只有8％的时间违反了我们的规则。最后，我们进行了广泛的分析，表明尽管我们的模型学会遵守我们的规则，但它可以表现出分布偏见。

Multi-document summarization (MDS) has traditionally been studied assuming a set of ground-truth topic-related input documents is provided. In practice, the input document set is unlikely to be available a priori and would need to be retrieved based on an information need, a setting we call open-domain MDS. We experiment with current state-of-the-art retrieval and summarization models on several popular MDS datasets extended to the open-domain setting. We find that existing summarizers suffer large reductions in performance when applied as-is to this more realistic task, though training summarizers with retrieved inputs can reduce their sensitivity retrieval errors. To further probe these findings, we conduct perturbation experiments on summarizer inputs to study the impact of different types of document retrieval errors. Based on our results, we provide practical guidelines to help facilitate a shift to open-domain MDS. We release our code and experimental results alongside all data or model artifacts created during our investigation.

Scholarly text is often laden with jargon, or specialized language that divides disciplines. We extend past work that characterizes science at the level of word types, by using BERT-based word sense induction to find additional words that are widespread but overloaded with different uses across fields. We define scholarly jargon as discipline-specific word types and senses, and estimate its prevalence across hundreds of fields using interpretable, information-theoretic metrics. We demonstrate the utility of our approach for science of science and computational sociolinguistics by highlighting two key social implications. First, we measure audience design, and find that most fields reduce jargon when publishing in general-purpose journals, but some do so more than others. Second, though jargon has varying correlation with articles' citation rates within fields, it nearly always impedes interdisciplinary impact. Broadly, our measurements can inform ways in which language could be revised to serve as a bridge rather than a barrier in science.

Science tests competing theories or models by evaluating the similarity of their predictions against observational experience. Thus, how we measure similarity fundamentally determines what we learn. In machine learning and scientific modeling, similarity metrics are used as objective functions. A classic example being mean squared error, which is the optimal measure of similarity when errors are normally distributed and independent and identically distributed (iid). In many cases, however, the error distribution is neither normal nor iid, so it is left to the scientist to determine an appropriate objective. Here, we review how information theory can guide that selection, then demonstrate the approach with a simple hydrologic model.

Wildfires are a common problem in many areas of the world with often catastrophic consequences. A number of systems have been created to provide early warnings of wildfires, including those that use satellite data to detect fires. The increased availability of small satellites, such as CubeSats, allows the wildfire detection response time to be reduced by deploying constellations of multiple satellites over regions of interest. By using machine learned components on-board the satellites, constraints which limit the amount of data that can be processed and sent back to ground stations can be overcome. There are hazards associated with wildfire alert systems, such as failing to detect the presence of a wildfire, or detecting a wildfire in the incorrect location. It is therefore necessary to be able to create a safety assurance case for the wildfire alert ML component that demonstrates it is sufficiently safe for use. This paper describes in detail how a safety assurance case for an ML wildfire alert system is created. This represents the first fully developed safety case for an ML component containing explicit argument and evidence as to the safety of the machine learning.

Many scientific domains gather sufficient labels to train machine algorithms through human-in-the-loop techniques provided by the Zooniverse.org citizen science platform. As the range of projects, task types and data rates increase, acceleration of model training is of paramount concern to focus volunteer effort where most needed. The application of Transfer Learning (TL) between Zooniverse projects holds promise as a solution. However, understanding the effectiveness of TL approaches that pretrain on large-scale generic image sets vs. images with similar characteristics possibly from similar tasks is an open challenge. We apply a generative segmentation model on two Zooniverse project-based data sets: (1) to identify fat droplets in liver cells (FatChecker; FC) and (2) the identification of kelp beds in satellite images (Floating Forests; FF) through transfer learning from the first project. We compare and contrast its performance with a TL model based on the COCO image set, and subsequently with baseline counterparts. We find that both the FC and COCO TL models perform better than the baseline cases when using >75% of the original training sample size. The COCO-based TL model generally performs better than the FC-based one, likely due to its generalized features. Our investigations provide important insights into usage of TL approaches on multi-domain data hosted across different Zooniverse projects, enabling future projects to accelerate task completion.

我们介绍了一种新的图像取证方法：将物理折射物（我们称为图腾）放入场景中，以保护该场景拍摄的任何照片。图腾弯曲并重定向光线，因此在单个图像中提供了多个（尽管扭曲）的多个（尽管扭曲）。防守者可以使用这些扭曲的图腾像素来检测是否已操纵图像。我们的方法通过估计场景中的位置并使用其已知的几何和材料特性来估算其位置，从而使光线通过图腾的光线不十障。为了验证图腾保护的图像，我们从图腾视点重建的场景与场景的外观从相机的角度来检测到不一致之处。这样的方法使对抗性操纵任务更加困难，因为对手必须以几何一致的方式对图腾和图像像素进行修改，而又不知道图腾的物理特性。与先前的基于学习的方法不同，我们的方法不需要在特定操作的数据集上进行培训，而是使用场景和相机的物理属性来解决取证问题。

了解强化学习（RL）代理的新兴行为可能很困难，因为这种代理通常使用高度复杂的决策程序在复杂的环境中进行训练。这引起了RL中解释性的多种方法，旨在调和可能在主体行为与观察者预期的行为之间产生的差异。最近的方法取决于域知识，这可能并非总是可用的，分析代理商的策略，或者是对基础环境的特定要素的分析，通常被建模为马尔可夫决策过程（MDP）。我们的主要主张是，即使基本的MDP尚不完全了解（例如，尚未准确地了解过渡概率），也没有由代理商维护（即，在使用无模型方法时），但仍可以利用它为自动生成解释。为此，我们建议使用以前在文献中使用的正式MDP抽象和转换来加快寻找最佳策略的搜索，以自动产生解释。由于这种转换通常基于环境的符号表示，因此它们可能代表了预期和实际代理行为之间差距的有意义的解释。我们正式定义了这个问题，建议一类可用于解释新兴行为的转换，并提出了有效搜索解释的方法。我们演示了一组标准基准测试的方法。

自2016年成立以来，Alexa奖计划使数百名大学生能够通过Socialbot Grand Challenge探索和竞争以发展对话代理商。挑战的目的是建立能够与人类在流行主题上连贯而诱人的代理人20分钟，同时达到至少4.0/5.0的平均评分。但是，由于对话代理商试图帮助用户完成日益复杂的任务，因此需要新的对话AI技术和评估平台。成立于2021年的Alexa奖Taskbot Challenge建立在Socialbot Challenge的成功基础上，通过引入交互式协助人类进行现实世界烹饪和做自己动手做的任务的要求，同时同时使用语音和视觉方式。这项挑战要求TaskBots识别和理解用户的需求，识别和集成任务和域知识，并开发新的方式，不分散用户的注意力，而不必分散他们的任务，以及其他挑战。本文概述了Taskbot挑战赛，描述了使用Cobot Toolkit提供给团队提供的基础架构支持，并总结了参与团队以克服研究挑战所采取的方法。最后，它分析了比赛第一年的竞争任务机器人的性能。