Related papers: New Algorithms and Applications for Risk-Limiting …
The increasing use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in various applications necessitates stringent protocols to ensure RAG systems accuracy, safety, and alignment with user intentions. In this paper, we introduce VERA…
Various risk-limiting audit (RLA) methods have been developed for instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. A recent method, AWAIRE, is the first efficient approach that can take advantage of but does not require cast vote records (CVRs).…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit systematic biases across demographic groups. Auditing is proposed as an accountability tool for black-box LLM applications, but suffers from resource-intensive query access. We conceptualise auditing as…
This paper presents DiffSum, a simple post-election risk-limiting ballot-polling audit for two-candidate plurality elections. DiffSum sequentially draws ballots (without replacement) until the numbers $a$, $b$, of votes for candidates $A$,…
A matrix algorithm runs superfast (aka at sublinear cost) if it involves much fewer flops and memory cells than an input matrix has entries. Big Data are frequently represented by matrices of immense sizes that cannot be handled directly…
Several election districts in the US have recently moved to ranked-choice voting (RCV) to decide the results of local elections. RCV allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds, eliminating one candidate at a…
Regulatory efforts to protect against algorithmic bias have taken on increased urgency with rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), which are machine learning models that can achieve performance rivaling human experts on a wide…
Majority voting is considered an effective method to enhance chain-of-thought reasoning, as it selects the answer with the highest "self-consistency" among different reasoning paths (Wang et al., 2023). However, previous chain-of-thought…
Repeated sampling is a standard way to spend test-time compute, but its benefit is controlled by the latent distribution of correctness across examples, not by one-call accuracy alone. We study the binary correctness layer of repeated LLM…
In the criminal legal context, risk assessment algorithms are touted as data-driven, well-tested tools. Studies known as validation tests are typically cited by practitioners to show that a particular risk assessment algorithm has…
Current sparse neural information retrieval (IR) methods, and to a lesser extent more traditional models such as BM25, do not take into account the document collection and the complex interplay between different term weights when…
The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…
The City and County of San Francisco, CA, has used Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) for some elections since 2004. This report describes the first ever process pilot of Risk Limiting Audits for IRV, for the San Francisco District Attorney's race…
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) adoption is expanding across U.S. elections, but faces persistent criticism for complexity, strategic manipulation, and ballot exhaustion. We empirically test these concerns on real election data, across three…
We propose a new ensemble prediction method, Random Subset Averaging (RSA), tailored for settings with many covariates, particularly in the presence of strong correlations. RSA constructs candidate models via binomial random subset strategy…
We call matrix algorithms superfast if they use much fewer flops and memory cells than the input matrix has entries. Using such algorithms is indispensable for Big Data Mining and Analysis, where the input matrices are so immense that one…
Georgia was central to efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, including a call from then-president Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger asking Raffensperger to `find' 11,780 votes. Raffensperger has maintained that…
This paper describes and tests a method for carrying out quantified reproducibility assessment (QRA) that is based on concepts and definitions from metrology. QRA produces a single score estimating the degree of reproducibility of a given…
Presidential primaries are a critical part of the United States Presidential electoral process, since they are used to select the candidates in the Presidential election. While methods differ by state and party, many primaries involve…
Iterative refinement is particularly popular for numerical solution of linear systems of equations. We extend it to Low Rank Approximation of a matrix (LRA) and observe close link of the resulting algorithm to oversampling techniques,…