Related papers: Opacity, Obscurity, and the Geometry of Question-A…
Inference, especially those derived from inductive processes, is a crucial component in our conversation to complement the information implicitly or explicitly conveyed by a speaker. While recent large language models show remarkable…
As opaque decision systems are being increasingly adopted in almost any application field, issues about their lack of transparency and human readability are a concrete concern for end-users. Amongst existing proposals to associate…
When a student is asked to perform a given task, her subjective estimate of the difficulty of that task has a strong influence on her performance. There exists a rich literature on the impact of perceived task difficulty on performance and…
We establish a connection between non-deterministic communication complexity and instance complexity, a measure of information based on algorithmic entropy. Let $\overline{x}$, $\overline{y}$ and $Y_1(\overline{x})$ be respectively the…
Conversational interfaces that allow for intuitive and comprehensive access to digitally stored information remain an ambitious goal. In this thesis, we lay foundations for designing conversational search systems by analyzing the…
Collecting fully annotated image datasets is challenging and expensive. Many types of weak supervision have been explored: weak manual annotations, web search results, temporal continuity, ambient sound and others. We focus on one…
Large Language Model (LLM) hallucinations are usually treated as defects of the model or its decoding strategy. Drawing on classical linguistics, we argue that a query's form can also shape a listener's (and model's) response. We…
The opaque nature of many intelligent systems violates established usability principles and thus presents a challenge for human-computer interaction. Research in the field therefore highlights the need for transparency, scrutability,…
Clarifying questions are an integral component of modern information retrieval systems, directly impacting user satisfaction and overall system performance. Poorly formulated questions can lead to user frustration and confusion, negatively…
As an important part of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Question Answering (QA) aims at generating answers to questions phrased in natural language. While there has been substantial progress in open-domain question answering, QA systems are…
We address the problem of estimating image difficulty defined as the human response time for solving a visual search task. We collect human annotations of image difficulty for the PASCAL VOC 2012 data set through a crowd-sourcing platform.…
We hypothesize that curiosity is a mechanism found by evolution that encourages meaningful exploration early in an agent's life in order to expose it to experiences that enable it to obtain high rewards over the course of its lifetime. We…
Most recent state-of-the-art Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are opaque black boxes that are only trained to fit the answer distribution given the question and visual content. As a result, these systems frequently take shortcuts,…
For a natural language understanding benchmark to be useful in research, it has to consist of examples that are diverse and difficult enough to discriminate among current and near-future state-of-the-art systems. However, we do not yet know…
Researchers have observed that Visual Question Answering (VQA) models tend to answer questions by learning statistical biases in the data. For example, their answer to the question "What is the color of the grass?" is usually "Green",…
Algorithmic accountability scholarship has focused heavily on explanation, helping affected parties understand why decisions were made. We argue this focus is insufficient. Explanation without evidentiary access does not enable meaningful…
Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external retrieval. However, they often over-search -- unnecessarily invoking search tool even when it does not improve response quality, which…
Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is…
Quora is one of the most popular community Q&A sites of recent times. However, many question posts on this Q&A site often do not get answered. In this paper, we quantify various linguistic activities that discriminates an answered question…
Broader disclosive transparency$-$truth and clarity in communication regarding the function of AI systems$-$is widely considered desirable. Unfortunately, it is a nebulous concept, difficult to both define and quantify. This is problematic,…