Daily Papers

Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth undermines their reliability, especially when users express vulnerability. We conducted controlled experiments on five language models of varying sizes and architectures, training them to produce warmer, more empathetic responses, then evaluating them on safety-critical tasks. Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing incorrect factual information, and offering problematic medical advice. They were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs, particularly when user messages expressed sadness. Importantly, these effects were consistent across different model architectures, and occurred despite preserved performance on standard benchmarks, revealing systematic risks that current evaluation practices may fail to detect. As human-like AI systems are deployed at an unprecedented scale, our findings indicate a need to rethink how we develop and oversee these systems that are reshaping human relationships and social interaction.

High-quality instruction data is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs). Although some models, such as Llama-3-Instruct, have open weights, their alignment data remain private, which hinders the democratization of AI. High human labor costs and a limited, predefined scope for prompting prevent existing open-source data creation methods from scaling effectively, potentially limiting the diversity and quality of public alignment datasets. Is it possible to synthesize high-quality instruction data at scale by extracting it directly from an aligned LLM? We present a self-synthesis method for generating large-scale alignment data named Magpie. Our key observation is that aligned LLMs like Llama-3-Instruct can generate a user query when we input only the left-side templates up to the position reserved for user messages, thanks to their auto-regressive nature. We use this method to prompt Llama-3-Instruct and generate 4 million instructions along with their corresponding responses. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the extracted data and select 300K high-quality instances. To compare Magpie data with other public instruction datasets, we fine-tune Llama-3-8B-Base with each dataset and evaluate the performance of the fine-tuned models. Our results indicate that in some tasks, models fine-tuned with Magpie perform comparably to the official Llama-3-8B-Instruct, despite the latter being enhanced with 10 million data points through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and subsequent feedback learning. We also show that using Magpie solely for SFT can surpass the performance of previous public datasets utilized for both SFT and preference optimization, such as direct preference optimization with UltraFeedback. This advantage is evident on alignment benchmarks such as AlpacaEval, ArenaHard, and WildBench.

The instruction hierarchy, which establishes a priority order from system messages to user messages, conversation history, and tool outputs, is essential for ensuring consistent and safe behavior in language models (LMs). Despite its importance, this topic receives limited attention, and there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy. We bridge this gap by introducing IHEval, a novel benchmark comprising 3,538 examples across nine tasks, covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict. Our evaluation of popular LMs highlights their struggle to recognize instruction priorities. All evaluated models experience a sharp performance decline when facing conflicting instructions, compared to their original instruction-following performance. Moreover, the most competitive open-source model only achieves 48% accuracy in resolving such conflicts. Our results underscore the need for targeted optimization in the future development of LMs.

In this paper, we show that when spoken language models (SLMs) are instructed to speak in a specific speaking style at the beginning of a multi-turn conversation, they cannot maintain the required speaking styles after several turns of interaction; we refer to this as the style amnesia of SLMs. We focus on paralinguistic speaking styles, including emotion, accent, volume, and speaking speed. We evaluate three proprietary and two open-source SLMs, demonstrating that none of these models can maintain a consistent speaking style when instructed to do so. We further show that when SLMs are asked to recall the style instruction in later turns, they can recall the style instruction, but they fail to express it throughout the conversation. We also show that explicitly asking the model to recall the style instruction can partially mitigate style amnesia. In addition, we examine various prompting strategies and find that SLMs struggle to follow the required style when the instruction is placed in system messages rather than user messages, which contradicts the intended function of system prompts.

In-context learning (ICL) is a critical emerging capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling few-shot learning during inference by including a few demonstrations (demos) in the prompt. However, it has been found that ICL's performance can be sensitive to the choices of demos and their order. This paper investigates an unexplored new positional bias of ICL for the first time: we observe that the predictions and accuracy can drift drastically when the positions of demos, the system prompt, and the user message in LLM input are varied. We refer to this bias as DEMOS' POSITION IN PROMPT (DPP) bias. We design a systematic evaluation pipeline to study this type of positional bias across classification, question answering, summarization, and reasoning tasks. We introduce two metrics, ACCURACY-CHANGE and PREDICTION-CHANGE, to quantify net gains and output volatility induced by changes in the demos' position. Extensive experiments on ten LLMs from four open-source model families (QWEN, LLAMA3, MISTRAL, COHERE) verify that the bias significantly affects their accuracy and predictions: placing demos at the start of the prompt yields the most stable and accurate outputs with gains of up to +6 points. In contrast, placing demos at the end of the user message flips over 30\% of predictions without improving correctness on QA tasks. Smaller models are most affected by this sensitivity, though even large models remain marginally affected on complex tasks.

People are increasingly seeking healthcare information from large language models (LLMs) via interactive chatbots, yet the nature and inherent risks of these conversations remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we filter large-scale conversational AI datasets to achieve HealthChat-11K, a curated dataset of 11K real-world conversations composed of 25K user messages. We use HealthChat-11K and a clinician-driven taxonomy for how users interact with LLMs when seeking healthcare information in order to systematically study user interactions across 21 distinct health specialties. Our analysis reveals insights into the nature of how and why users seek health information, such as common interactions, instances of incomplete context, affective behaviors, and interactions (e.g., leading questions) that can induce sycophancy, underscoring the need for improvements in the healthcare support capabilities of LLMs deployed as conversational AI. Code and artifacts to retrieve our analyses and combine them into a curated dataset can be found here: https://github.com/yahskapar/HealthChat

We present ModularSubsetSelection (MSS), a new algorithm for locally differentially private (LDP) frequency estimation. Given a universe of size k and n users, our varepsilon-LDP mechanism encodes each input via a Residue Number System (RNS) over ell pairwise-coprime moduli m_0, ldots, m_{ell-1}, and reports a randomly chosen index j in [ell] along with the perturbed residue using the statistically optimal SubsetSelection (SS) (Wang et al. 2016). This design reduces the user communication cost from Θbigl(ωlog_2(k/ω)bigr) bits required by standard SS (with ωapprox k/(e^varepsilon+1)) down to lceil log_2 ell rceil + lceil log_2 m_j rceil bits, where m_j < k. Server-side decoding runs in Θ(n + r k ell) time, where r is the number of LSMR (Fong and Saunders 2011) iterations. In practice, with well-conditioned moduli (i.e., constant r and ell = Θ(log k)), this becomes Θ(n + k log k). We prove that MSS achieves worst-case MSE within a constant factor of state-of-the-art protocols such as SS and ProjectiveGeometryResponse (PGR) (Feldman et al. 2022) while avoiding the algebraic prerequisites and dynamic-programming decoder required by PGR. Empirically, MSS matches the estimation accuracy of SS, PGR, and RAPPOR (Erlingsson, Pihur, and Korolova 2014) across realistic (k, varepsilon) settings, while offering faster decoding than PGR and shorter user messages than SS. Lastly, by sampling from multiple moduli and reporting only a single perturbed residue, MSS achieves the lowest reconstruction-attack success rate among all evaluated LDP protocols.

System messages play a crucial role in interactions with large language models (LLMs), often serving as prompts to initiate conversations. Through system messages, users can assign specific roles, perform intended tasks, incorporate background information, specify various output formats and communication styles. Despite such versatility, publicly available data are often lack system messages and subject to strict license constraints in the industry field. Manual labeling of publicly available data with system messages that align with user instructions demands significant resources. In view of such challenges, our work introduces SysGen, a pipeline for generating system messages with better aligned assistant responses from the supervised fine-tuning dataset without system messages. Training on SysGen data has demonstrated substantial improvements in the alignment of model responses with system messages and user instructions, as demonstrated across various open-source models on the Multifacet benchmark, while maintaining minimal impact on other unseen benchmarks such as Open LLM Leaderboard 2. Our qualitative analysis highlights the importance of diverse system messages to ensure better adaptability across different contexts.

Not all topics are equally "flammable" in terms of toxicity: a calm discussion of turtles or fishing less often fuels inappropriate toxic dialogues than a discussion of politics or sexual minorities. We define a set of sensitive topics that can yield inappropriate and toxic messages and describe the methodology of collecting and labeling a dataset for appropriateness. While toxicity in user-generated data is well-studied, we aim at defining a more fine-grained notion of inappropriateness. The core of inappropriateness is that it can harm the reputation of a speaker. This is different from toxicity in two respects: (i) inappropriateness is topic-related, and (ii) inappropriate message is not toxic but still unacceptable. We collect and release two datasets for Russian: a topic-labeled dataset and an appropriateness-labeled dataset. We also release pre-trained classification models trained on this data.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in interactive applications, and human evaluation remains the gold standard for assessing their performance in multi-turn conversations. Since human studies are costly, time-consuming, and hard to reproduce, recent work explores using LLMs to simulate users for automatic assistant evaluation. However, there is no benchmark or systematic study to evaluate whether these simulated users are reliable stand-ins for real users. To address this, we introduce SimulatorArena, a benchmark of 909 annotated human-LLM conversations on two interactive tasks -- math tutoring and document creation. SimulatorArena evaluates simulators based on how closely their messages match human behavior and how well their assistant ratings align with human judgments. Experiments on various simulator methods show that simulators conditioned on user profiles, capturing traits like background and message styles, align closely with human judgments. They reach Spearman's rho of 0.7 on both tasks, providing a practical, scalable alternative to human evaluation. Using the best simulator for each task, we benchmark 18 assistants, including the latest LLMs such as GPT-5, Claude 4.1 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Human-computer interaction has long imagined technology that understands us-from our preferences and habits, to the timing and purpose of our everyday actions. Yet current user models remain fragmented, narrowly tailored to specific apps, and incapable of the flexible reasoning required to fulfill these visions. This paper presents an architecture for a general user model (GUM) that learns about you by observing any interaction you have with your computer. The GUM takes as input any unstructured observation of a user (e.g., device screenshots) and constructs confidence-weighted propositions that capture that user knowledge and preferences. GUMs can infer that a user is preparing for a wedding they're attending from messages with a friend. Or recognize that a user is struggling with a collaborator's feedback on a draft by observing multiple stalled edits and a switch to reading related work. GUMs introduce an architecture that infers new propositions about a user from multimodal observations, retrieves related propositions for context, and continuously revises existing propositions. To illustrate the breadth of applications that GUMs enable, we demonstrate how they augment chat-based assistants with context, manage OS notifications to selectively surface important information, and enable interactive agents that adapt to preferences across apps. We also instantiate proactive assistants (GUMBOs) that discover and execute useful suggestions on a user's behalf using their GUM. In our evaluations, we find that GUMs make calibrated and accurate inferences about users, and that assistants built on GUMs proactively identify and perform actions that users wouldn't think to request explicitly. Altogether, GUMs introduce methods that leverage multimodal models to understand unstructured context, enabling long-standing visions of HCI and entirely new interactive systems that anticipate user needs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become instrumental across various applications, with the customization of these models to specific scenarios becoming increasingly critical. System message, a fundamental component of LLMs, is consist of carefully crafted instructions that guide the behavior of model to meet intended goals. Despite the recognized potential of system messages to optimize AI-driven solutions, there is a notable absence of a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating how well different LLMs follow these system messages. To fill this gap, we introduce SysBench, a benchmark that systematically analyzes system message following ability in terms of three challenging aspects: constraint complexity, instruction misalignment and multi-turn stability. In order to enable effective evaluation, SysBench constructs multi-turn user conversations covering various interaction relationships, based on six common types of constraints from system messages in real-world scenarios. Our dataset contains 500 system messages from various domains, each paired with 5 turns of user conversations, which have been manually formulated and checked to guarantee high quality. SysBench provides extensive evaluation across various LLMs, measuring their ability to follow specified constraints given in system messages. The results highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of existing models, offering key insights and directions for future research. The open source library SysBench is available at https://github.com/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/SysBench.

Online misinformation poses a global risk with harmful implications for society. Ordinary social media users are known to actively reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which is shown to be effective in containing the spread of misinformation. Such a practice is defined as "social correction". Nevertheless, it remains unknown how users respond to social correction in real-world scenarios, especially, will it have a corrective or backfire effect on users. Investigating this research question is pivotal for developing and refining strategies that maximize the efficacy of social correction initiatives. To fill this gap, we conduct an in-depth study to characterize and predict the user response to social correction in a data-driven manner through the lens of X (Formerly Twitter), where the user response is instantiated as the reply that is written toward a counter-misinformation message. Particularly, we first create a novel dataset with 55, 549 triples of misinformation tweets, counter-misinformation replies, and responses to counter-misinformation replies, and then curate a taxonomy to illustrate different kinds of user responses. Next, fine-grained statistical analysis of reply linguistic and engagement features as well as repliers' user attributes is conducted to illustrate the characteristics that are significant in determining whether a reply will have a corrective or backfire effect. Finally, we build a user response prediction model to identify whether a social correction will be corrective, neutral, or have a backfire effect, which achieves a promising F1 score of 0.816. Our work enables stakeholders to monitor and predict user responses effectively, thus guiding the use of social correction to maximize their corrective impact and minimize backfire effects. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/response-to-social-correction.

Improvements in diffusion models have boosted the quality of image generation, which has led researchers, companies, and creators to focus on improving watermarking algorithms. This provision would make it possible to clearly identify the creators of generative art. The main challenges that modern watermarking algorithms face have to do with their ability to withstand attacks and encrypt many unique messages, such as user IDs. In this paper, we present METR: Message Enhanced Tree-Ring, which is an approach that aims to address these challenges. METR is built on the Tree-Ring watermarking algorithm, a technique that makes it possible to encode multiple distinct messages without compromising attack resilience or image quality. This ensures the suitability of this watermarking algorithm for any Diffusion Model. In order to surpass the limitations on the quantity of encoded messages, we propose METR++, an enhanced version of METR. This approach, while limited to the Latent Diffusion Model architecture, is designed to inject a virtually unlimited number of unique messages. We demonstrate its robustness to attacks and ability to encrypt many unique messages while preserving image quality, which makes METR and METR++ hold great potential for practical applications in real-world settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/deepvk/metr

Instant messaging has become a predominant form of communication, with texts and emoticons enabling users to express emotions and ideas efficiently. Emoticons, in particular, have gained significant traction as a medium for conveying sentiments and information, leading to the growing importance of emoticon retrieval and recommendation systems. However, one of the key challenges in this area has been the absence of datasets that capture both the temporal dynamics and user-specific interactions with emoticons, limiting the progress of personalized user modeling and recommendation approaches. To address this, we introduce the emoticon dataset, a comprehensive resource that includes time-based data along with anonymous user identifiers across different conversations. As the largest publicly accessible emoticon dataset to date, it comprises 22K unique users, 370K emoticons, and 8.3M messages. The data was collected from a widely-used messaging platform across 67 conversations and 720 hours of crawling. Strict privacy and safety checks were applied to ensure the integrity of both text and image data. Spanning across 10 distinct domains, the emoticon dataset provides rich insights into temporal, multilingual, and cross-domain behaviors, which were previously unavailable in other emoticon-based datasets. Our in-depth experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate the dataset's potential in modeling user behavior and personalized recommendation systems, opening up new possibilities for research in personalized retrieval and conversational AI. The dataset is freely accessible.

Recommender system has deeply revolutionized people's daily life and production, bringing a large amount of business value. In the recommendation domain, simulation and real data-based studies are two typical research paradigms, with each having different advantages. Previously, real data-based studies occupy more important positions, since accurately simulating the user preference is quite difficult. Recently, large language models (LLM) have shown great potential to achieve human-like intelligence, which provides new opportunities to overcome the shortcomings of simulation-based studies and thus highlight their advantages, such as much more application scenarios and cheaper data acquisition strategies. To shed lights on this direction, in this paper, we introduce an LLM-based recommender simulator called RecAgent. Our simulator is composed of two modules: (1) the user module and (2) the recommender module. The user module can browse the recommendation website, communicate with other users and broadcast messages on the social media. The recommender module is designed to provide search or recommendation lists to the users, and one can design different models to implement the recommender. All the users take actions based on LLMs, and can freely evolve like in the real world. We present several case studies to demonstrate that the users in our simulator can indeed behave in a reasonable manner as expected. Our project has been released at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/YuLan-Rec.

A key component of building safe and reliable language models is enabling the models to appropriately refuse to follow certain instructions or answer certain questions. We may want models to output refusal messages for various categories of user queries, for example, ill-posed questions, instructions for committing illegal acts, or queries which require information past the model's knowledge horizon. Engineering models that refuse to answer such questions is complicated by the fact that an individual may want their model to exhibit varying levels of sensitivity for refusing queries of various categories, and different users may want different refusal rates. The current default approach involves training multiple models with varying proportions of refusal messages from each category to achieve the desired refusal rates, which is computationally expensive and may require training a new model to accommodate each user's desired preference over refusal rates. To address these challenges, we propose refusal tokens, one such token for each refusal category or a single refusal token, which are prepended to the model's responses during training. We then show how to increase or decrease the probability of generating the refusal token for each category during inference to steer the model's refusal behavior. Refusal tokens enable controlling a single model's refusal rates without the need of any further fine-tuning, but only by selectively intervening during generation.

In shuffle privacy, each user sends a collection of randomized messages to a trusted shuffler, the shuffler randomly permutes these messages, and the resulting shuffled collection of messages must satisfy differential privacy. Prior work in this model has largely focused on protocols that use a single round of communication to compute algorithmic primitives like means, histograms, and counts. We present interactive shuffle protocols for stochastic convex optimization. Our protocols rely on a new noninteractive protocol for summing vectors of bounded ell_2 norm. By combining this sum subroutine with mini-batch stochastic gradient descent, accelerated gradient descent, and Nesterov's smoothing method, we obtain loss guarantees for a variety of convex loss functions that significantly improve on those of the local model and sometimes match those of the central model.

Effective cyber threat recognition and prevention demand comprehensible forecasting systems, as prior approaches commonly offer limited and, ultimately, unconvincing information. We introduce Simplified Plaintext Language (SPLAIN), a natural language generator that converts warning data into user-friendly cyber threat explanations. SPLAIN is designed to generate clear, actionable outputs, incorporating hierarchically organized explanatory details about input data and system functionality. Given the inputs of individual sensor-induced forecasting signals and an overall warning from a fusion module, SPLAIN queries each signal for information on contributing sensors and data signals. This collected data is processed into a coherent English explanation, encompassing forecasting, sensing, and data elements for user review. SPLAIN's template-based approach ensures consistent warning structure and vocabulary. SPLAIN's hierarchical output structure allows each threat and its components to be expanded to reveal underlying explanations on demand. Our conclusions emphasize the need for designers to specify the "how" and "why" behind cyber warnings, advocate for simple structured templates in generating consistent explanations, and recognize that direct causal links in Machine Learning approaches may not always be identifiable, requiring some explanations to focus on general methodologies, such as model and training data.

Recent researches on video large language models (VideoLLM) predominantly focus on model architectures and training datasets, leaving the interaction format between the user and the model under-explored. In existing works, users often interact with VideoLLMs by using the entire video and a query as input, after which the model generates a response. This interaction format constrains the application of VideoLLMs in scenarios such as live-streaming comprehension where videos do not end and responses are required in a real-time manner, and also results in unsatisfactory performance on time-sensitive tasks that requires localizing video segments. In this paper, we focus on a video-text duet interaction format. This interaction format is characterized by the continuous playback of the video, and both the user and the model can insert their text messages at any position during the video playback. When a text message ends, the video continues to play, akin to the alternative of two performers in a duet. We construct MMDuetIT, a video-text training dataset designed to adapt VideoLLMs to video-text duet interaction format. We also introduce the Multi-Answer Grounded Video Question Answering (MAGQA) task to benchmark the real-time response ability of VideoLLMs. Trained on MMDuetIT, MMDuet demonstrates that adopting the video-text duet interaction format enables the model to achieve significant improvements in various time-sensitive tasks (76% CIDEr on YouCook2 dense video captioning, 90\% mAP on QVHighlights highlight detection and 25% R@0.5 on Charades-STA temporal video grounding) with minimal training efforts, and also enable VideoLLMs to reply in a real-time manner as the video plays. Code, data and demo are available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/MMDuet.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to security and safety threats, such as prompt injection, prompt extraction, and harmful requests. One major cause of these vulnerabilities is the lack of an instruction hierarchy. Modern LLM architectures treat all inputs equally, failing to distinguish between and prioritize various types of instructions, such as system messages, user prompts, and data. As a result, lower-priority user prompts may override more critical system instructions, including safety protocols. Existing approaches to achieving instruction hierarchy, such as delimiters and instruction-based training, do not address this issue at the architectural level. We introduce the Instructional Segment Embedding (ISE) technique, inspired by BERT, to modern large language models, which embeds instruction priority information directly into the model. This approach enables models to explicitly differentiate and prioritize various instruction types, significantly improving safety against malicious prompts that attempt to override priority rules. Our experiments on the Structured Query and Instruction Hierarchy benchmarks demonstrate an average robust accuracy increase of up to 15.75% and 18.68%, respectively. Furthermore, we observe an improvement in instruction-following capability of up to 4.1% evaluated on AlpacaEval. Overall, our approach offers a promising direction for enhancing the safety and effectiveness of LLM architectures.

As Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains such as shopping, health, and news, they are exposed to pervasive persuasive content. A critical question is how these models function as persuadees-how and why they can be influenced by persuasive multimodal inputs. Understanding both their susceptibility to persuasion and the effectiveness of different persuasive strategies is crucial, as overly persuadable models may adopt misleading beliefs, override user preferences, or generate unethical or unsafe outputs when exposed to manipulative messages. We introduce MMPersuade, a unified framework for systematically studying multimodal persuasion dynamics in LVLMs. MMPersuade contributes (i) a comprehensive multimodal dataset that pairs images and videos with established persuasion principles across commercial, subjective and behavioral, and adversarial contexts, and (ii) an evaluation framework that quantifies both persuasion effectiveness and model susceptibility via third-party agreement scoring and self-estimated token probabilities on conversation histories. Our study of six leading LVLMs as persuadees yields three key insights: (i) multimodal inputs substantially increase persuasion effectiveness-and model susceptibility-compared to text alone, especially in misinformation scenarios; (ii) stated prior preferences decrease susceptibility, yet multimodal information maintains its persuasive advantage; and (iii) different strategies vary in effectiveness across contexts, with reciprocity being most potent in commercial and subjective contexts, and credibility and logic prevailing in adversarial contexts. By jointly analyzing persuasion effectiveness and susceptibility, MMPersuade provides a principled foundation for developing models that are robust, preference-consistent, and ethically aligned when engaging with persuasive multimodal content.

Commit message generation (CMG) is a crucial task in software engineering that is challenging to evaluate correctly. When a CMG system is integrated into the IDEs and other products at JetBrains, we perform online evaluation based on user acceptance of the generated messages. However, performing online experiments with every change to a CMG system is troublesome, as each iteration affects users and requires time to collect enough statistics. On the other hand, offline evaluation, a prevalent approach in the research literature, facilitates fast experiments but employs automatic metrics that are not guaranteed to represent the preferences of real users. In this work, we describe a novel way we employed to deal with this problem at JetBrains, by leveraging an online metric - the number of edits users introduce before committing the generated messages to the VCS - to select metrics for offline experiments. To support this new type of evaluation, we develop a novel markup collection tool mimicking the real workflow with a CMG system, collect a dataset with 57 pairs consisting of commit messages generated by GPT-4 and their counterparts edited by human experts, and design and verify a way to synthetically extend such a dataset. Then, we use the final dataset of 656 pairs to study how the widely used similarity metrics correlate with the online metric reflecting the real users' experience. Our results indicate that edit distance exhibits the highest correlation, whereas commonly used similarity metrics such as BLEU and METEOR demonstrate low correlation. This contradicts the previous studies on similarity metrics for CMG, suggesting that user interactions with a CMG system in real-world settings differ significantly from the responses by human labelers operating within controlled research environments. We release all the code and the dataset for researchers: https://jb.gg/cmg-evaluation.

Although humans inherently have diverse values, current large language model (LLM) alignment methods often assume that aligning LLMs with the general public's preferences is optimal. A major challenge in adopting a more individualized approach to LLM alignment is its lack of scalability, as it involves repeatedly acquiring preference data and training new reward models and LLMs for each individual's preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm where users specify what they value most within the system message, steering the LLM's generation behavior to better align with the user's intentions. However, a naive application of such an approach is non-trivial since LLMs are typically trained on a uniform system message (e.g., "You are a helpful assistant") which limits their ability to generalize to diverse, unseen system messages. To improve this generalization, we create the Multifaceted Collection, a preference dataset with 192k combinations of values beyond generic helpfulness and harmlessness, spanning 65k user instructions. Using this dataset, we train a 7B LLM called Janus and test it on 921 prompts from 5 benchmarks (AlpacaEval 2.0, FLASK, Koala, MT-Bench, and Self-Instruct) by adding various unseen system messages that reflect user preferences. Janus achieves tie+win rate of 75.2%, 72.4%, and 66.4% against Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4, respectively. Unexpectedly, on three benchmarks focused on response helpfulness (AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench, Arena Hard Auto v0.1), Janus also outperforms LLaMA 3 8B Instruct by a +4.0%, +0.1%, +3.0% margin, underscoring that training with a vast array of system messages could also enhance alignment to the general public's preference as well. Our code, dataset, benchmark, and models are available at https://github.com/kaistAI/Janus.

The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.

This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help

Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. To alleviate this, we propose including some of a user's preferences and instructions in natural language -- collectively termed standing instructions -- as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user states I'm hungry, their previously expressed preference for Persian food will be automatically added to the LLM prompt, so as to influence the search for relevant restaurants. We develop NLSI, a language-to-program dataset consisting of over 2.4K dialogues spanning 17 domains, where each dialogue is paired with a user profile (a set of users specific standing instructions) and corresponding structured representations (API calls). A key challenge in NLSI is to identify which subset of the standing instructions is applicable to a given dialogue. NLSI contains diverse phenomena, from simple preferences to interdependent instructions such as triggering a hotel search whenever the user is booking tickets to an event. We conduct experiments on NLSI using prompting with large language models and various retrieval approaches, achieving a maximum of 44.7% exact match on API prediction. Our results demonstrate the challenges in identifying the relevant standing instructions and their interpretation into API calls.

In this work, we research user preferences to see a chart, table, or text given a question asked by the user. This enables us to understand when it is best to show a chart, table, or text to the user for the specific question. For this, we conduct a user study where users are shown a question and asked what they would prefer to see and used the data to establish that a user's personal traits does influence the data outputs that they prefer. Understanding how user characteristics impact a user's preferences is critical to creating data tools with a better user experience. Additionally, we investigate to what degree an LLM can be used to replicate a user's preference with and without user preference data. Overall, these findings have significant implications pertaining to the development of data tools and the replication of human preferences using LLMs. Furthermore, this work demonstrates the potential use of LLMs to replicate user preference data which has major implications for future user modeling and personalization research.

Recent years have witnessed an interesting phenomenon in which users come together to interrogate potentially harmful algorithmic behaviors they encounter in their everyday lives. Researchers have started to develop theoretical and empirical understandings of these user driven audits, with a hope to harness the power of users in detecting harmful machine behaviors. However, little is known about user participation and their division of labor in these audits, which are essential to support these collective efforts in the future. Through collecting and analyzing 17,984 tweets from four recent cases of user driven audits, we shed light on patterns of user participation and engagement, especially with the top contributors in each case. We also identified the various roles user generated content played in these audits, including hypothesizing, data collection, amplification, contextualization, and escalation. We discuss implications for designing tools to support user driven audits and users who labor to raise awareness of algorithm bias.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

Natural Language Search (NLS) extends the capabilities of search engines that perform keyword search allowing users to issue queries in a more "natural" language. The engine tries to understand the meaning of the queries and to map the query words to the symbols it supports like Persons, Organizations, Time Expressions etc.. It, then, retrieves the information that satisfies the user's need in different forms like an answer, a record or a list of records. We present an NLS system we implemented as part of the Search service of a major CRM platform. The system is currently in production serving thousands of customers. Our user studies showed that creating dynamic reports with NLS saved more than 50% of our user's time compared to achieving the same result with navigational search. We describe the architecture of the system, the particularities of the CRM domain as well as how they have influenced our design decisions. Among several submodules of the system we detail the role of a Deep Learning Named Entity Recognizer. The paper concludes with discussion over the lessons learned while developing this product.

Modeling long histories plays a pivotal role in enhancing recommendation systems, allowing to capture user's evolving preferences, resulting in more precise and personalized recommendations. In this study we tackle the challenges of modeling long user histories for preference understanding in natural language. Specifically, we introduce a new User Embedding Module (UEM) that efficiently processes user history in free-form text by compressing and representing them as embeddings, to use them as soft prompts to a LM. Our experiments demonstrate the superior capability of this approach in handling significantly longer histories compared to conventional text based prompting methods, yielding substantial improvements in predictive performance. The main contribution of this research is to demonstrate the ability to bias language models with user signals represented as embeddings.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). In practical scenarios like recommendations, as users increasingly seek personalized experiences, it becomes crucial to incorporate user interaction history into the context of LLMs to enhance personalization. However, from a practical utility perspective, user interactions' extensive length and noise present challenges when used directly as text prompts. A promising solution is to compress and distill interactions into compact embeddings, serving as soft prompts to assist LLMs in generating personalized responses. Although this approach brings efficiency, a critical concern emerges: Can user embeddings adequately capture valuable information and prompt LLMs? To address this concern, we propose \name, a benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness of user embeddings in prompting LLMs for personalization. We establish a fair and standardized evaluation process, encompassing pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation stages. To thoroughly evaluate user embeddings, we design three dimensions of tasks: sequence understanding, action prediction, and interest perception. These evaluation tasks cover the industry's demands in traditional recommendation tasks, such as improving prediction accuracy, and its aspirations for LLM-based methods, such as accurately understanding user interests and enhancing the user experience. We conduct extensive experiments on various state-of-the-art methods for modeling user embeddings. Additionally, we reveal the scaling laws of leveraging user embeddings to prompt LLMs. The benchmark is available online.

Human-model conversations provide a window into users' real-world scenarios, behavior, and needs, and thus are a valuable resource for model development and research. While for-profit companies collect user data through the APIs of their models, using it internally to improve their own models, the open source and research community lags behind. We introduce the ShareLM collection, a unified set of human conversations with large language models, and its accompanying plugin, a Web extension for voluntarily contributing user-model conversations. Where few platforms share their chats, the ShareLM plugin adds this functionality, thus, allowing users to share conversations from most platforms. The plugin allows the user to rate their conversations, both at the conversation and the response levels, and delete conversations they prefer to keep private before they ever leave the user's local storage. We release the plugin conversations as part of the ShareLM collection, and call for more community effort in the field of open human-model data. The code, plugin, and data are available.

Recent studies have proposed unified user modeling frameworks that leverage user behavior data from various applications. Many of them benefit from utilizing users' behavior sequences as plain texts, representing rich information in any domain or system without losing generality. Hence, a question arises: Can language modeling for user history corpus help improve recommender systems? While its versatile usability has been widely investigated in many domains, its applications to recommender systems still remain underexplored. We show that language modeling applied directly to task-specific user histories achieves excellent results on diverse recommendation tasks. Also, leveraging additional task-agnostic user histories delivers significant performance benefits. We further demonstrate that our approach can provide promising transfer learning capabilities for a broad spectrum of real-world recommender systems, even on unseen domains and services.

Conversational LLMs function as black box systems, leaving users guessing about why they see the output they do. This lack of transparency is potentially problematic, especially given concerns around bias and truthfulness. To address this issue, we present an end-to-end prototype-connecting interpretability techniques with user experience design-that seeks to make chatbots more transparent. We begin by showing evidence that a prominent open-source LLM has a "user model": examining the internal state of the system, we can extract data related to a user's age, gender, educational level, and socioeconomic status. Next, we describe the design of a dashboard that accompanies the chatbot interface, displaying this user model in real time. The dashboard can also be used to control the user model and the system's behavior. Finally, we discuss a study in which users conversed with the instrumented system. Our results suggest that users appreciate seeing internal states, which helped them expose biased behavior and increased their sense of control. Participants also made valuable suggestions that point to future directions for both design and machine learning research. The project page and video demo of our TalkTuner system are available at https://bit.ly/talktuner-project-page

Extensive efforts in automated approaches for content moderation have been focused on developing models to identify toxic, offensive, and hateful content with the aim of lightening the load for moderators. Yet, it remains uncertain whether improvements on those tasks have truly addressed moderators' needs in accomplishing their work. In this paper, we surface gaps between past research efforts that have aimed to provide automation for aspects of content moderation and the needs of volunteer content moderators, regarding identifying violations of various moderation rules. To do so, we conduct a model review on Hugging Face to reveal the availability of models to cover various moderation rules and guidelines from three exemplar forums. We further put state-of-the-art LLMs to the test, evaluating how well these models perform in flagging violations of platform rules from one particular forum. Finally, we conduct a user survey study with volunteer moderators to gain insight into their perspectives on useful moderation models. Overall, we observe a non-trivial gap, as missing developed models and LLMs exhibit moderate to low performance on a significant portion of the rules. Moderators' reports provide guides for future work on developing moderation assistant models.

Conversational agents are increasingly used to address emotional needs on top of information needs. One use case of increasing interest are counselling-style mental health and behaviour change interventions, with large language model (LLM)-based approaches becoming more popular. Research in this context so far has been largely system-focused, foregoing the aspect of user behaviour and the impact this can have on LLM-generated texts. To address this issue, we share a dataset containing text-based user interactions related to behaviour change with two GPT-4-based conversational agents collected in a preregistered user study. This dataset includes conversation data, user language analysis, perception measures, and user feedback for LLM-generated turns, and can offer valuable insights to inform the design of such systems based on real interactions.

In this paper, we present Smart Compose, a novel system for generating interactive, real-time suggestions in Gmail that assists users in writing mails by reducing repetitive typing. In the design and deployment of such a large-scale and complicated system, we faced several challenges including model selection, performance evaluation, serving and other practical issues. At the core of Smart Compose is a large-scale neural language model. We leveraged state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for language model training which enabled high-quality suggestion prediction, and constructed novel serving infrastructure for high-throughput and real-time inference. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed system design and deployment approach. This system is currently being served in Gmail.

We develop a high-quality multi-turn dialog dataset, DailyDialog, which is intriguing in several aspects. The language is human-written and less noisy. The dialogues in the dataset reflect our daily communication way and cover various topics about our daily life. We also manually label the developed dataset with communication intention and emotion information. Then, we evaluate existing approaches on DailyDialog dataset and hope it benefit the research field of dialog systems.

Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become increasingly important with a wide range of applications. Despite the importance and recent progress, most existing works on personalized LLMs have focused either entirely on (a) personalized text generation or (b) leveraging LLMs for personalization-related downstream applications, such as recommendation systems. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two separate main directions for the first time by introducing a taxonomy for personalized LLM usage and summarizing the key differences and challenges. We provide a formalization of the foundations of personalized LLMs that consolidates and expands notions of personalization of LLMs, defining and discussing novel facets of personalization, usage, and desiderata of personalized LLMs. We then unify the literature across these diverse fields and usage scenarios by proposing systematic taxonomies for the granularity of personalization, personalization techniques, datasets, evaluation methods, and applications of personalized LLMs. Finally, we highlight challenges and important open problems that remain to be addressed. By unifying and surveying recent research using the proposed taxonomies, we aim to provide a clear guide to the existing literature and different facets of personalization in LLMs, empowering both researchers and practitioners.

This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving medical information search in the CISMeF system (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) by including a conversational agent to interact with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes involved during the information search, a bottom-up methodology was adopted. Experimentation has been set up to obtain human dialogs between a user (playing the role of patient) dealing with medical information search and a CISMeF expert refining the request. The analysis of these dialogs underlined the use of discursive evidence: vocabulary, reformulation, implicit or explicit expression of user intentions, conversational sequences, etc. A model of artificial agent is proposed. It leads the user in its information search by proposing to him examples, assistance and choices. This model was implemented and integrated in the CISMeF system. ---- Cet article d\'ecrit le projet Cogni-CISMeF qui propose un module de dialogue Homme-Machine \`a int\'egrer dans le syst\`eme d'indexation de connaissances m\'edicales CISMeF (Catalogue et Index des Sites M\'edicaux Francophones). Nous avons adopt\'e une d\'emarche de mod\'elisation cognitive en proc\'edant \`a un recueil de corpus de dialogues entre un utilisateur (jouant le r\^ole d'un patient) d\'esirant une information m\'edicale et un expert CISMeF af inant cette demande pour construire la requ\^ete. Nous avons analys\'e la structure des dialogues ainsi obtenus et avons \'etudi\'e un certain nombre d'indices discursifs : vocabulaire employ\'e, marques de reformulation, commentaires m\'eta et \'epilinguistiques, expression implicite ou explicite des intentions de l'utilisateur, encha\^inement conversationnel, etc. De cette analyse, nous avons construit un mod\`ele d'agent artificiel dot\'e de capacit\'es cognitives capables d'aider l'utilisateur dans sa t\^ache de recherche d'information. Ce mod\`ele a \'et\'e impl\'ement\'e et int\'egr\'e dans le syst\`eme CISMeF.

Long-text generation is seemingly ubiquitous in real-world applications of large language models such as generating an email or writing a review. Despite the fundamental importance and prevalence of long-text generation in many practical applications, existing work on personalized generation has focused on the generation of very short text. To overcome these limitations, we study the problem of personalized long-text generation, that is, generating long-text that is personalized for a specific user while being practically useful for the vast majority of real-world applications that naturally require the generation of longer text. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of user-specific personalization for long-text generation tasks and develop the Long-text Language Model Personalization (LongLaMP) Benchmark. LongLaMP provides a comprehensive and diverse evaluation framework for personalized long-text generation. Extensive experiments on LongLaMP for zero-shot and fine-tuned language tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed benchmark and its utility for developing and evaluating techniques for personalized long-text generation across a wide variety of long-text generation tasks. The results highlight the importance of personalization across a wide variety of long-text generation tasks. Finally, we release the benchmark for others to use for this important problem.

Recommender systems exploit interaction history to estimate user preference, having been heavily used in a wide range of industry applications. However, static recommendation models are difficult to answer two important questions well due to inherent shortcomings: (a) What exactly does a user like? (b) Why does a user like an item? The shortcomings are due to the way that static models learn user preference, i.e., without explicit instructions and active feedback from users. The recent rise of conversational recommender systems (CRSs) changes this situation fundamentally. In a CRS, users and the system can dynamically communicate through natural language interactions, which provide unprecedented opportunities to explicitly obtain the exact preference of users. Considerable efforts, spread across disparate settings and applications, have been put into developing CRSs. Existing models, technologies, and evaluation methods for CRSs are far from mature. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of the techniques used in current CRSs. We summarize the key challenges of developing CRSs in five directions: (1) Question-based user preference elicitation. (2) Multi-turn conversational recommendation strategies. (3) Dialogue understanding and generation. (4) Exploitation-exploration trade-offs. (5) Evaluation and user simulation. These research directions involve multiple research fields like information retrieval (IR), natural language processing (NLP), and human-computer interaction (HCI). Based on these research directions, we discuss some future challenges and opportunities. We provide a road map for researchers from multiple communities to get started in this area. We hope this survey can help to identify and address challenges in CRSs and inspire future research.

Names are deeply tied to human identity. They can serve as markers of individuality, cultural heritage, and personal history. However, using names as a core indicator of identity can lead to over-simplification of complex identities. When interacting with LLMs, user names are an important point of information for personalisation. Names can enter chatbot conversations through direct user input (requested by chatbots), as part of task contexts such as CV reviews, or as built-in memory features that store user information for personalisation. We study biases associated with names by measuring cultural presumptions in the responses generated by LLMs when presented with common suggestion-seeking queries, which might involve making assumptions about the user. Our analyses demonstrate strong assumptions about cultural identity associated with names present in LLM generations across multiple cultures. Our work has implications for designing more nuanced personalisation systems that avoid reinforcing stereotypes while maintaining meaningful customisation.

Recommender systems are quintessential applications of human-computer interaction. Widely utilized in daily life, they offer significant convenience but also present numerous challenges, such as the information cocoon effect, privacy concerns, fairness issues, and more. Consequently, this workshop aims to provide a platform for researchers to explore the development of Human-Centered Recommender Systems~(HCRS). HCRS refers to the creation of recommender systems that prioritize human needs, values, and capabilities at the core of their design and operation. In this workshop, topics will include, but are not limited to, robustness, privacy, transparency, fairness, diversity, accountability, ethical considerations, and user-friendly design. We hope to engage in discussions on how to implement and enhance these properties in recommender systems. Additionally, participants will explore diverse evaluation methods, including innovative metrics that capture user satisfaction and trust. This workshop seeks to foster a collaborative environment for researchers to share insights and advance the field toward more ethical, user-centric, and socially responsible recommender systems.

This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with limited bandwidth. Therefore, in this challenge, we provide a common evaluation framework to evaluate mixed-initiative conversations. Participants are asked to rank clarifying questions in an information-seeking conversations. The challenge is organized in two stages where in Stage 1 we evaluate the submissions in an offline setting and single-turn conversations. Top participants of Stage 1 get the chance to have their model tested by human annotators.

User profile modeling plays a key role in personalized systems, as it requires building accurate profiles and updating them with new information. In this paper, we present two high-quality open-source user profile datasets: one for profile construction and another for profile updating. These datasets offer a strong basis for evaluating user profile modeling techniques in dynamic settings. We also show a methodology that uses large language models (LLMs) to tackle both profile construction and updating. Our method uses a probabilistic framework to predict user profiles from input text, allowing for precise and context-aware profile generation. Our experiments demonstrate that models like Mistral-7b and Llama2-7b perform strongly in both tasks. LLMs improve the precision and recall of the generated profiles, and high evaluation scores confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. However, effectively incorporating complex and potentially noisy user interaction data remains a challenge. To address this, we propose User-LLM, a novel framework that leverages user embeddings to contextualize LLMs. These embeddings, distilled from diverse user interactions using self-supervised pretraining, capture latent user preferences and their evolution over time. We integrate these user embeddings with LLMs through cross-attention and soft-prompting, enabling LLMs to dynamically adapt to user context. Our comprehensive experiments on MovieLens, Amazon Review, and Google Local Review datasets demonstrate significant performance gains across various tasks. Notably, our approach outperforms text-prompt-based contextualization on long sequence tasks and tasks that require deep user understanding while being computationally efficient. We further incorporate Perceiver layers to streamline the integration between user encoders and LLMs, reducing computational demands.

Chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT are now serving millions of users. Despite their widespread use, there remains a lack of public datasets showcasing how these tools are used by a population of users in practice. To bridge this gap, we offered free access to ChatGPT for online users in exchange for their affirmative, consensual opt-in to anonymously collect their chat transcripts and request headers. From this, we compiled WildChat, a corpus of 1 million user-ChatGPT conversations, which consists of over 2.5 million interaction turns. We compare WildChat with other popular user-chatbot interaction datasets, and find that our dataset offers the most diverse user prompts, contains the largest number of languages, and presents the richest variety of potentially toxic use-cases for researchers to study. In addition to timestamped chat transcripts, we enrich the dataset with demographic data, including state, country, and hashed IP addresses, alongside request headers. This augmentation allows for more detailed analysis of user behaviors across different geographical regions and temporal dimensions. Finally, because it captures a broad range of use cases, we demonstrate the dataset's potential utility in fine-tuning instruction-following models. WildChat is released at https://wildchat.allen.ai under AI2 ImpACT Licenses.

In applications such as personal assistants, large language models (LLMs) must consider the user's personal information and preferences. However, LLMs lack the inherent ability to learn from user interactions. This paper explores capturing personal information from user prompts using ontology and knowledge-graph approaches. We use a subset of the KNOW ontology, which models personal information, to train the language model on these concepts. We then evaluate the success of knowledge capture using a specially constructed dataset. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/HaltiaAI/paper-PTODSKC

Today's image generation systems are capable of producing realistic and high-quality images. However, user prompts often contain ambiguities, making it difficult for these systems to interpret users' actual intentions. Consequently, many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our annotation tools and several examples of our dataset are available at https://zenodo.org/records/14876029 for easier review. We will make open source our full dataset and code.

Personalization, the ability to tailor a system to individual users, is an essential factor in user experience with natural language processing (NLP) systems. With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), a key question is how to leverage these models to better personalize user experiences. To personalize a language model's output, a straightforward approach is to incorporate past user data into the language model prompt, but this approach can result in lengthy inputs exceeding limitations on input length and incurring latency and cost issues. Existing approaches tackle such challenges by selectively extracting relevant user data (i.e. selective retrieval) to construct a prompt for downstream tasks. However, retrieval-based methods are limited by potential information loss, lack of more profound user understanding, and cold-start challenges. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel summary-augmented approach by extending retrieval-augmented personalization with task-aware user summaries generated by LLMs. The summaries can be generated and stored offline, enabling real-world systems with runtime constraints like voice assistants to leverage the power of LLMs. Experiments show our method with 75% less of retrieved user data is on-par or outperforms retrieval augmentation on most tasks in the LaMP personalization benchmark. We demonstrate that offline summarization via LLMs and runtime retrieval enables better performance for personalization on a range of tasks under practical constraints.

Toxic language, such as hate speech, can deter users from participating in online communities and enjoying popular platforms. Previous approaches to detecting toxic language and norm violations have been primarily concerned with conversations from online forums and social media, such as Reddit and Twitter. These approaches are less effective when applied to conversations on live-streaming platforms, such as Twitch and YouTube Live, as each comment is only visible for a limited time and lacks a thread structure that establishes its relationship with other comments. In this work, we share the first NLP study dedicated to detecting norm violations in conversations on live-streaming platforms. We define norm violation categories in live-stream chats and annotate 4,583 moderated comments from Twitch. We articulate several facets of live-stream data that differ from other forums, and demonstrate that existing models perform poorly in this setting. By conducting a user study, we identify the informational context humans use in live-stream moderation, and train models leveraging context to identify norm violations. Our results show that appropriate contextual information can boost moderation performance by 35\%.

The proliferation of harmful content on online platforms is a major societal problem, which comes in many different forms including hate speech, offensive language, bullying and harassment, misinformation, spam, violence, graphic content, sexual abuse, self harm, and many other. Online platforms seek to moderate such content to limit societal harm, to comply with legislation, and to create a more inclusive environment for their users. Researchers have developed different methods for automatically detecting harmful content, often focusing on specific sub-problems or on narrow communities, as what is considered harmful often depends on the platform and on the context. We argue that there is currently a dichotomy between what types of harmful content online platforms seek to curb, and what research efforts there are to automatically detect such content. We thus survey existing methods as well as content moderation policies by online platforms in this light and we suggest directions for future work.

With the increasing importance of online communities, discussion forums, and customer reviews, Internet "trolls" have proliferated thereby making it difficult for information seekers to find relevant and correct information. In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting and identifying Internet trolls, almost all of which are human agents. Identifying a human agent among a human population presents significant challenges compared to detecting automated spam or computerized robots. To learn a troll's behavior, we use contextual anomaly detection to profile each chat user. Using clustering and distance-based methods, we use contextual data such as the group's current goal, the current time, and the username to classify each point as an anomaly. A user whose features significantly differ from the norm will be classified as a troll. We collected 38 million data points from the viral Internet fad, Twitch Plays Pokemon. Using clustering and distance-based methods, we develop heuristics for identifying trolls. Using MapReduce techniques for preprocessing and user profiling, we are able to classify trolls based on 10 features extracted from a user's lifetime history.

Recommender systems are software applications that help users to find items of interest in situations of information overload. Current research often assumes a one-shot interaction paradigm, where the users' preferences are estimated based on past observed behavior and where the presentation of a ranked list of suggestions is the main, one-directional form of user interaction. Conversational recommender systems (CRS) take a different approach and support a richer set of interactions. These interactions can, for example, help to improve the preference elicitation process or allow the user to ask questions about the recommendations and to give feedback. The interest in CRS has significantly increased in the past few years. This development is mainly due to the significant progress in the area of natural language processing, the emergence of new voice-controlled home assistants, and the increased use of chatbot technology. With this paper, we provide a detailed survey of existing approaches to conversational recommendation. We categorize these approaches in various dimensions, e.g., in terms of the supported user intents or the knowledge they use in the background. Moreover, we discuss technological approaches, review how CRS are evaluated, and finally identify a number of gaps that deserve more research in the future.

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new disruptive possibilities for persuasive communication, by enabling fully-automated personalized and interactive content generation at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we survey the research field of LLM-based persuasion that has emerged as a result. We begin by exploring the different modes in which LLM Systems are used to influence human attitudes and behaviors. In areas such as politics, marketing, public health, e-commerce, and charitable giving, such LLM Systems have already achieved human-level or even super-human persuasiveness. We identify key factors influencing their effectiveness, such as the manner of personalization and whether the content is labelled as AI-generated. We also summarize the experimental designs that have been used to evaluate progress. Our survey suggests that the current and future potential of LLM-based persuasion poses profound ethical and societal risks, including the spread of misinformation, the magnification of biases, and the invasion of privacy. These risks underscore the urgent need for ethical guidelines and updated regulatory frameworks to avoid the widespread deployment of irresponsible and harmful LLM Systems.

Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) have advanced information-seeking tasks by integrating retrieval into generation, reducing users' cognitive burden compared to traditional search systems. Yet they remain insufficient for fully addressing diverse user needs, which requires recognizing how the same query can reflect different intents across users and delivering information in preferred forms. While recent systems such as ChatGPT and Gemini attempt personalization by leveraging user histories, systematic evaluation of such personalization is under-explored. To address this gap, we propose BESPOKE, the realistic benchmark for evaluating personalization in search-augmented LLMs. BESPOKE is designed to be both realistic, by collecting authentic chat and search histories directly from humans, and diagnostic, by pairing responses with fine-grained preference scores and feedback. The benchmark is constructed through long-term, deeply engaged human annotation, where human annotators contributed their own histories, authored queries with detailed information needs, and evaluated responses with scores and diagnostic feedback. Leveraging BESPOKE, we conduct systematic analyses that reveal key requirements for effective personalization in information-seeking tasks, providing a foundation for fine-grained evaluation of personalized search-augmented LLMs. Our code and data are available at https://augustinlib.github.io/BESPOKE/.

When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs directly, but instead provide references to (hopefully authoritative) answers. Successful question answering systems offer a limited corpus created on-demand by human experts, which is neither timely nor scalable. Pre-trained language models, by contrast, are capable of directly generating prose that may be responsive to an information need, but at present they are dilettantes rather than domain experts -- they do not have a true understanding of the world, they are prone to hallucinating, and crucially they are incapable of justifying their utterances by referring to supporting documents in the corpus they were trained over. This paper examines how ideas from classical information retrieval and pre-trained language models can be synthesized and evolved into systems that truly deliver on the promise of domain expert advice.

Personalization plays a critical role in numerous language tasks and applications, since users with the same requirements may prefer diverse outputs based on their individual interests. This has led to the development of various personalized approaches aimed at adapting large language models (LLMs) to generate customized outputs aligned with user preferences. Some of them involve fine-tuning a unique personalized LLM for each user, which is too expensive for widespread application. Alternative approaches introduce personalization information in a plug-and-play manner by retrieving the user's relevant historical texts as demonstrations. However, this retrieval-based strategy may break the continuity of the user history and fail to capture the user's overall styles and patterns, hence leading to sub-optimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel personalized LLM model, . It constructs a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling all her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module. By attaching this embedding to the task input, LLMs can better understand and capture user habits and preferences, thereby producing more personalized outputs without tuning their own parameters. Extensive experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches.

In this work, we introduce the task of life-long personalization of large language models. While recent mainstream efforts in the LLM community mainly focus on scaling data and compute for improved capabilities of LLMs, we argue that it is also very important to enable LLM systems, or language agents, to continuously adapt to the diverse and ever-changing profiles of every distinct user and provide up-to-date personalized assistance. We provide a clear task formulation and introduce a simple, general, effective, and scalable framework for life-long personalization of LLM systems and language agents. To facilitate future research on LLM personalization, we also introduce methods to synthesize realistic benchmarks and robust evaluation metrics. We will release all codes and data for building and benchmarking life-long personalized LLM systems.

Instant Messaging is a popular means for daily communication, allowing users to send text and stickers. As the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words", so developing an effective sticker retrieval technique is crucial for enhancing user experience. However, existing sticker retrieval methods rely on labeled data to interpret stickers, and general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to capture the unique semantics of stickers. Additionally, relevant-based sticker retrieval methods lack personalization, creating a gap between diverse user expectations and retrieval results. To address these, we propose the Personalized Sticker Retrieval with Vision-Language Model framework, namely PerSRV, structured into offline calculations and online processing modules. The online retrieval part follows the paradigm of relevant recall and personalized ranking, supported by the offline pre-calculation parts, which are sticker semantic understanding, utility evaluation and personalization modules. Firstly, for sticker-level semantic understanding, we supervised fine-tuned LLaVA-1.5-7B to generate human-like sticker semantics, complemented by textual content extracted from figures and historical interaction queries. Secondly, we investigate three crowd-sourcing metrics for sticker utility evaluation. Thirdly, we cluster style centroids based on users' historical interactions to achieve personal preference modeling. Finally, we evaluate our proposed PerSRV method on a public sticker retrieval dataset from WeChat, containing 543,098 candidates and 12,568 interactions. Experimental results show that PerSRV significantly outperforms existing methods in multi-modal sticker retrieval. Additionally, our fine-tuned VLM delivers notable improvements in sticker semantic understandings.

Internet is one of the important inventions and a large number of persons are its users. These persons use this for different purposes. There are different social media platforms that are accessible to these users. Any user can make a post or spread the news through the online platforms. These platforms do not verify the users or their posts. So some of the users try to spread fake news through these platforms. These news can be propaganda against an individual, society, organization or political party. A human being is unable to detect all these fake news. So there is a need for machine learning classifiers that can detect these fake news automatically. Use of machine learning classifiers for detecting fake news is described in this systematic literature review.

Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialog data is difficult, especially for highly specific domains that require expert knowledge. At the same time, informal communication channels such as instant messengers are increasingly being used at work. This has led to a lot of work-relevant information that is disseminated through those channels and needs to be post-processed manually by the employees. To alleviate this problem, we present TexPrax, a messaging system to collect and annotate problems, causes, and solutions that occur in work-related chats. TexPrax uses a chatbot to directly engage the employees to provide lightweight annotations on their conversation and ease their documentation work. To comply with data privacy and security regulations, we use an end-to-end message encryption and give our users full control over their data which has various advantages over conventional annotation tools. We evaluate TexPrax in a user-study with German factory employees who ask their colleagues for solutions on problems that arise during their daily work. Overall, we collect 202 task-oriented German dialogues containing 1,027 sentences with sentence-level expert annotations. Our data analysis also reveals that real-world conversations frequently contain instances with code-switching, varying abbreviations for the same entity, and dialects which NLP systems should be able to handle.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing (NLP) community, with adoption throughout many services like healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service. Since users include people with critical information needs like students or patients engaging with chatbots, the safety of these systems is of prime importance. Therefore, a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs is necessary. To this end, we systematically evaluate toxicity in over half a million generations of ChatGPT, a popular dialogue-based LLM. We find that setting the system parameter of ChatGPT by assigning it a persona, say that of the boxer Muhammad Ali, significantly increases the toxicity of generations. Depending on the persona assigned to ChatGPT, its toxicity can increase up to 6x, with outputs engaging in incorrect stereotypes, harmful dialogue, and hurtful opinions. This may be potentially defamatory to the persona and harmful to an unsuspecting user. Furthermore, we find concerning patterns where specific entities (e.g., certain races) are targeted more than others (3x more) irrespective of the assigned persona, that reflect inherent discriminatory biases in the model. We hope that our findings inspire the broader AI community to rethink the efficacy of current safety guardrails and develop better techniques that lead to robust, safe, and trustworthy AI systems.

Although language model-based chat systems are increasingly used in daily life, most Americans remain non-adopters of chat-based LLMs -- as of June 2025, 66% had never used ChatGPT. At the same time, LLM development and evaluation rely mainly on data from adopters (e.g., logs, preference data), focusing on the needs and tasks for a limited demographic group of adopters in terms of geographic location, education, and gender. In this position paper, we argue that incorporating non-adopter perspectives is essential for developing broadly useful and capable LLMs. We contend that relying on methods that focus primarily on adopters will risk missing a range of tasks and needs prioritized by non-adopters, entrenching inequalities in who benefits from LLMs, and creating oversights in model development and evaluation. To illustrate this claim, we conduct case studies with non-adopters and show: how non-adopter needs diverge from those of current users, how non-adopter needs point us towards novel reasoning tasks, and how to systematically integrate non-adopter needs via human-centered methods.

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit undesirable behavior. Although several preventive measures have been developed to mitigate the potential risks associated with LLMs, they have primarily focused on English data. In this study, we reveal the presence of multilingual jailbreak challenges within LLMs and consider two potential risk scenarios: unintentional and intentional. The unintentional scenario involves users querying LLMs using non-English prompts and inadvertently bypassing the safety mechanisms, while the intentional scenario concerns malicious users combining malicious instructions with multilingual prompts to deliberately attack LLMs. The experimental results reveal that in the unintentional scenario, the rate of unsafe content increases as the availability of languages decreases. Specifically, low-resource languages exhibit three times the likelihood of encountering harmful content compared to high-resource languages, with both ChatGPT and GPT-4. In the intentional scenario, multilingual prompts can exacerbate the negative impact of malicious instructions, with astonishingly high rates of unsafe output: 80.92\% for ChatGPT and 40.71\% for GPT-4. To handle such a challenge in the multilingual context, we propose a novel Self-Defense framework that automatically generates multilingual training data for safety fine-tuning. Experimental results show that ChatGPT fine-tuned with such data can achieve a substantial reduction in unsafe content generation. Data is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multilingual-safety-for-LLMs. Warning: This paper contains examples with potentially harmful content.

In this paper, we explore a new way for user targeting, where non-expert marketers could select their target users solely given demands in natural language form. The key to this issue is how to transform natural languages into practical structured logical languages, i.e., the structured understanding of marketer demands. Considering the impressive natural language processing ability of large language models (LLMs), we try to leverage LLMs to solve this issue. Past research indicates that the reasoning ability of LLMs can be effectively enhanced through chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. But existing methods still have some limitations: (1) Previous methods either use simple "Let's think step by step" spells or provide fixed examples in demonstrations without considering compatibility between prompts and questions, making LLMs ineffective in some complex reasoning tasks such as structured language transformation. (2) Previous methods are often implemented in closed-source models or excessively large models, which is not suitable in industrial practical scenarios. Based on these, we propose ARALLM (i.e., Analogical Reasoning Augmented Large Language Models) consisting of two modules: Analogical Reasoning based Prompting and Reasoning-Augmented Multi-Task Model Distillation.

We present Speakerly, a new real-time voice-based writing assistance system that helps users with text composition across various use cases such as emails, instant messages, and notes. The user can interact with the system through instructions or dictation, and the system generates a well-formatted and coherent document. We describe the system architecture and detail how we address the various challenges while building and deploying such a system at scale. More specifically, our system uses a combination of small, task-specific models as well as pre-trained language models for fast and effective text composition while supporting a variety of input modes for better usability.

While smishing (SMS Phishing) attacks have risen to become one of the most common types of social engineering attacks, there is a lack of relevant smishing datasets. One of the biggest challenges in the domain of smishing prevention is the availability of fresh smishing datasets. Additionally, as time persists, smishing campaigns are shut down and the crucial information related to the attack are lost. With the changing nature of smishing attacks, a consistent flow of new smishing examples is needed by both researchers and engineers to create effective defenses. In this paper, we present the community-sourced smishing datasets from the smishtank.com. It provides a wealth of information relevant to combating smishing attacks through the breakdown and analysis of smishing samples at the point of submission. In the contribution of our work, we provide a corpus of 1090 smishing samples that have been publicly submitted through the site. Each message includes information relating to the sender, message body, and any brands referenced in the message. Additionally, when a URL is found, we provide additional information on the domain, VirusTotal results, and a characterization of the URL. Through the open access of fresh smishing data, we empower academia and industries to create robust defenses against this evolving threat.

In recent years, Recommender Systems(RS) have witnessed a transformative shift with the advent of Large Language Models(LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing(NLP). These models such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5/4, Llama from Meta, have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. This has led to a paradigm shift in the realm of personalized and explainable recommendations, as LLMs offer a versatile toolset for processing vast amounts of textual data to enhance user experiences. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the existing LLM-based recommendation systems, this survey aims to analyze how RS can benefit from LLM-based methodologies. Furthermore, we describe major challenges in Personalized Explanation Generating(PEG) tasks, which are cold-start problems, unfairness and bias problems in RS.

Warning: This paper may contain examples and topics that may be disturbing to some readers, especially survivors of miscarriage and sexual violence. People affected by abortion, miscarriage, or sexual violence often share their experiences on social media to express emotions and seek support. On public platforms like Reddit, where users can post long, detailed narratives (up to 40,000 characters), readers may be exposed to distressing content. Although Reddit allows manual trigger warnings, many users omit them due to limited awareness or uncertainty about which categories apply. There is scarcity of datasets on Reddit stories labeled for triggering experiences. We propose a curated Reddit dataset, TWeddit, covering triggering experiences related to issues majorly faced by women. Our linguistic analyses show that annotated stories in TWeddit express distinct topics and moral foundations, making the dataset useful for a wide range of future research.

The recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heralded a new era of human-AI interaction. These sophisticated models, exemplified by Chat-GPT and its successors, have exhibited remarkable capabilities in language understanding. However, as these LLMs have undergone exponential growth, a crucial dimension that remains understudied is the personalization of these models. Large foundation models such as GPT-3 etc. focus on creating a universal model that serves a broad range of tasks and users. This approach emphasizes the model's generalization capabilities, treating users as a collective rather than as distinct individuals. While practical for many common applications, this one-size-fits-all approach often fails to address the rich tapestry of human diversity and individual needs. To explore this issue we introduce the PEFT-U Benchmark: a new dataset for building and evaluating NLP models for user personalization. consists of a series of user-centered tasks containing diverse and individualized expressions where the preferences of users can potentially differ for the same input. Using PEFT-U, we explore the challenge of efficiently personalizing LLMs to accommodate user-specific preferences in the context of diverse user-centered tasks.

This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Interaction Harms, VI. Automation, Access, and Environmental Harms. The first area concerns the perpetuation of stereotypes, unfair discrimination, exclusionary norms, toxic language, and lower performance by social group for LMs. The second focuses on risks from private data leaks or LMs correctly inferring sensitive information. The third addresses risks arising from poor, false or misleading information including in sensitive domains, and knock-on risks such as the erosion of trust in shared information. The fourth considers risks from actors who try to use LMs to cause harm. The fifth focuses on risks specific to LLMs used to underpin conversational agents that interact with human users, including unsafe use, manipulation or deception. The sixth discusses the risk of environmental harm, job automation, and other challenges that may have a disparate effect on different social groups or communities. In total, we review 21 risks in-depth. We discuss the points of origin of different risks and point to potential mitigation approaches. Lastly, we discuss organisational responsibilities in implementing mitigations, and the role of collaboration and participation. We highlight directions for further research, particularly on expanding the toolkit for assessing and evaluating the outlined risks in LMs.

Emails and SMSs are the most popular tools in today communications, and as the increase of emails and SMSs users are increase, the number of spams is also increases. Spam is any kind of unwanted, unsolicited digital communication that gets sent out in bulk, spam emails and SMSs are causing major resource wastage by unnecessarily flooding the network links. Although most spam mail originate with advertisers looking to push their products, some are much more malicious in their intent like phishing emails that aims to trick victims into giving up sensitive information like website logins or credit card information this type of cybercrime is known as phishing. To countermeasure spams, many researches and efforts are done to build spam detectors that are able to filter out messages and emails as spam or ham. In this research we build a spam detector using BERT pre-trained model that classifies emails and messages by understanding to their context, and we trained our spam detector model using multiple corpuses like SMS collection corpus, Enron corpus, SpamAssassin corpus, Ling-Spam corpus and SMS spam collection corpus, our spam detector performance was 98.62%, 97.83%, 99.13% and 99.28% respectively. Keywords: Spam Detector, BERT, Machine learning, NLP, Transformer, Enron Corpus, SpamAssassin Corpus, SMS Spam Detection Corpus, Ling-Spam Corpus.

Some users of social media are spreading racist, sexist, and otherwise hateful content. For the purpose of training a hate speech detection system, the reliability of the annotations is crucial, but there is no universally agreed-upon definition. We collected potentially hateful messages and asked two groups of internet users to determine whether they were hate speech or not, whether they should be banned or not and to rate their degree of offensiveness. One of the groups was shown a definition prior to completing the survey. We aimed to assess whether hate speech can be annotated reliably, and the extent to which existing definitions are in accordance with subjective ratings. Our results indicate that showing users a definition caused them to partially align their own opinion with the definition but did not improve reliability, which was very low overall. We conclude that the presence of hate speech should perhaps not be considered a binary yes-or-no decision, and raters need more detailed instructions for the annotation.

Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point have addressed this problem with software engineering-specific automated query reformulation techniques, which work without developer involvement but are limited by the content of the original query. In other words, these techniques automatically improve the existing query but can not contribute new, previously unmentioned, concepts. Objective: In this paper, we propose a technique to guide software developers in manually improving their own Web search queries. We examine a conversational approach that follows unsuccessful queries with a clarification question aimed at eliciting additional query terms, thus providing to the developer a clear dimension along which the query could be improved. Methods: We describe a set of clarification questions derived from a corpus of software developer queries and a neural approach to recommending them for a newly issued query. Results: Our evaluation indicates that the recommendation technique is accurate, predicting a valid clarification question 80% of the time and outperforms simple baselines, as well as, state-of-the-art Learning To Rank (LTR) baselines. Conclusion: As shown in the experimental results, the described approach is capable at recommending appropriate clarification questions to software developers and considered useful by a sample of developers ranging from novices to experienced professionals.

Large-scale language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are becoming increasingly sophisticated and exhibit human-like capabilities, playing an essential role in assisting humans in a variety of everyday tasks. An important application of AI is interactive recommendation systems that respond to human inquiries and make recommendations tailored to the user. In most conventional interactive recommendation systems, the language model is used only as a dialogue model, and there is a separate recommendation system. This is due to the fact that the language model used as a dialogue system does not have the capability to serve as a recommendation system. Therefore, we will realize the construction of a dialogue system with recommendation capability by using OpenAI's Chat-GPT, which has a very high inference capability as a dialogue system and the ability to generate high-quality sentences, and verify the effectiveness of the system.

Despite significant progress in the field, it is still challenging to create personalized visual representations that align closely with the desires and preferences of individual users. This process requires users to articulate their ideas in words that are both comprehensible to the models and accurately capture their vision, posing difficulties for many users. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by leveraging historical user interactions with the system to enhance user prompts. We propose a novel approach that involves rewriting user prompts based on a newly collected large-scale text-to-image dataset with over 300k prompts from 3115 users. Our rewriting model enhances the expressiveness and alignment of user prompts with their intended visual outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods over baseline approaches, as evidenced in our new offline evaluation method and online tests. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/Tailored-Visions .

With increasing demand for and adoption of virtual assistants, recent work has investigated ways to accelerate bot schema design through the automatic induction of intents or the induction of slots and dialogue states. However, a lack of dedicated benchmarks and standardized evaluation has made progress difficult to track and comparisons between systems difficult to make. This challenge track, held as part of the Eleventh Dialog Systems Technology Challenge, introduces a benchmark that aims to evaluate methods for the automatic induction of customer intents in a realistic setting of customer service interactions between human agents and customers. We propose two subtasks for progressively tackling the automatic induction of intents and corresponding evaluation methodologies. We then present three datasets suitable for evaluating the tasks and propose simple baselines. Finally, we summarize the submissions and results of the challenge track, for which we received submissions from 34 teams.

In recent years, hate speech has gained great relevance in social networks and other virtual media because of its intensity and its relationship with violent acts against members of protected groups. Due to the great amount of content generated by users, great effort has been made in the research and development of automatic tools to aid the analysis and moderation of this speech, at least in its most threatening forms. One of the limitations of current approaches to automatic hate speech detection is the lack of context. Most studies and resources are performed on data without context; that is, isolated messages without any type of conversational context or the topic being discussed. This restricts the available information to define if a post on a social network is hateful or not. In this work, we provide a novel corpus for contextualized hate speech detection based on user responses to news posts from media outlets on Twitter. This corpus was collected in the Rioplatense dialectal variety of Spanish and focuses on hate speech associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Classification experiments using state-of-the-art techniques show evidence that adding contextual information improves hate speech detection performance for two proposed tasks (binary and multi-label prediction). We make our code, models, and corpus available for further research.

Since the proliferation of LLMs, there have been concerns about their misuse for harmful content creation and spreading. Recent studies justify such fears, providing evidence of LLM vulnerabilities and high potential of their misuse. Humans are no longer able to distinguish between high-quality machine-generated and authentic human-written texts. Therefore, it is crucial to develop automated means to accurately detect machine-generated content. It would enable to identify such content in online information space, thus providing an additional information about its credibility. This work addresses the problem by proposing a robust fine-tuning process of LLMs for the detection task, making the detectors more robust against obfuscation and more generalizable to out-of-distribution data.

Once language models (LMs) are deployed, they can interact with users long-term, ideally evolving continuously based on their feedback. Asking for direct user feedback can be disruptive; thus, we study harvesting user feedback from user-LM interaction logs. We study implicit user feedback in two user-LM interaction datasets (WildChat and LMSYS). First, we analyze user feedback in the user-LLM conversation trajectory, providing insights into when and why such feedback occurs. Second, we study harvesting learning signals from such implicit user feedback. We find that the contents of user feedback (e.g., user wanted clarification), not just the polarity (e.g., users were unhappy with the previous model response), can improve model performance in short human-designed questions (MTBench) but not on longer and more complex questions (WildBench). We also find that the usefulness of user feedback is largely tied to the quality of the user's initial prompt. Together, we provide an in-depth study of implicit user feedback, showing its potential and limitations.

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the existing focus of NLP research accurately captures the genuine requirements of human users. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the divergence between current NLP research and the needs of real-world NLP applications via a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations. We analyze a large-scale collection of real user queries to GPT. We compare these queries against existing NLP benchmark tasks and identify a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks that are commonly studied in academic research. For example, we find that tasks such as ``design'' and ``planning'' are prevalent in user interactions but are largely neglected or different from traditional NLP benchmarks. We investigate these overlooked tasks, dissect the practical challenges they pose, and provide insights toward a roadmap to make LLMs better aligned with user needs.

The problem of categorizing short speech sentences according to their semantic features with high accuracy is a subject studied in natural language processing. In this study, a data set created with samples classified in 46 different categories was used. Examples consist of sentences taken from chat conversations between a company's customer representatives and the company's website visitors. The primary purpose is to automatically tag questions and requests from visitors in the most accurate way for 46 predetermined categories for use in a chat application to generate meaningful answers to the questions asked by the website visitors. For this, different BERT models and one GPT-2 model, pre-trained in Turkish, were preferred. The classification performances of the relevant models were analyzed in detail and reported accordingly.

The introduction of ChatGPT has garnered widespread attention in both academic and industrial communities. ChatGPT is able to respond effectively to a wide range of human questions, providing fluent and comprehensive answers that significantly surpass previous public chatbots in terms of security and usefulness. On one hand, people are curious about how ChatGPT is able to achieve such strength and how far it is from human experts. On the other hand, people are starting to worry about the potential negative impacts that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could have on society, such as fake news, plagiarism, and social security issues. In this work, we collected tens of thousands of comparison responses from both human experts and ChatGPT, with questions ranging from open-domain, financial, medical, legal, and psychological areas. We call the collected dataset the Human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus (HC3). Based on the HC3 dataset, we study the characteristics of ChatGPT's responses, the differences and gaps from human experts, and future directions for LLMs. We conducted comprehensive human evaluations and linguistic analyses of ChatGPT-generated content compared with that of humans, where many interesting results are revealed. After that, we conduct extensive experiments on how to effectively detect whether a certain text is generated by ChatGPT or humans. We build three different detection systems, explore several key factors that influence their effectiveness, and evaluate them in different scenarios. The dataset, code, and models are all publicly available at https://github.com/Hello-SimpleAI/chatgpt-comparison-detection.

In modern commercial systems, including Recommendation, Ranking, and E-Commerce platforms, there is a trend towards improving customer experiences by incorporating Personalization context as input into Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs often struggle to effectively parse and utilize sparse and complex personal context without additional processing or contextual enrichment, underscoring the need for more sophisticated context understanding mechanisms. In this work, we propose Guided Profile Generation (GPG), a general method designed to generate personal profiles in natural language. As is observed, intermediate guided profile generation enables LLMs to summarize, and extract the important, distinctive features from the personal context into concise, descriptive sentences, precisely tailoring their generation more closely to an individual's unique habits and preferences. Our experimental results show that GPG improves LLM's personalization ability across different tasks, for example, it increases 37% accuracy in predicting personal preference compared to directly feeding the LLMs with raw personal context.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tackling various natural language tasks. However, due to the significant costs involved in re-training or fine-tuning them, they remain largely static and difficult to personalize. Nevertheless, a variety of applications could benefit from generations that are tailored to users' preferences, goals, and knowledge. Among them is web search, where knowing what a user is trying to accomplish, what they care about, and what they know can lead to improved search experiences. In this work, we propose a novel and general approach that augments an LLM with relevant context from users' interaction histories with a search engine in order to personalize its outputs. Specifically, we construct an entity-centric knowledge store for each user based on their search and browsing activities on the web, which is then leveraged to provide contextually relevant LLM prompt augmentations. This knowledge store is light-weight, since it only produces user-specific aggregate projections of interests and knowledge onto public knowledge graphs, and leverages existing search log infrastructure, thereby mitigating the privacy, compliance, and scalability concerns associated with building deep user profiles for personalization. We then validate our approach on the task of contextual query suggestion, which requires understanding not only the user's current search context but also what they historically know and care about. Through a number of experiments based on human evaluation, we show that our approach is significantly better than several other LLM-powered baselines, generating query suggestions that are contextually more relevant, personalized, and useful.

A primary concern regarding training large language models (LLMs) is whether they abuse copyrighted online text. With the increasing training data scale and the prevalence of LLMs in daily lives, two problems arise: 1) false positive membership inference results misled by similar examples; 2) membership inference methods are usually too complex for end users to understand and use. To address these issues, we propose an alternative insert-and-detect methodology, advocating that web users and content platforms employ \textit{unique identifiers} for reliable and independent membership inference. Users and platforms can create their identifiers, embed them in copyrighted text, and independently detect them in future LLMs. As an initial demonstration, we introduce \textbf{ghost sentences} and a user-friendly last-k words test, allowing end users to chat with LLMs for membership inference. Ghost sentences consist primarily of unique passphrases of random natural words, which can come with customized elements to bypass possible filter rules. The last-k words test requires a significant repetition time of ghost sentences~(ge10). For cases with fewer repetitions, we designed an extra perplexity test, as LLMs exhibit high perplexity when encountering unnatural passphrases. We also conduct a comprehensive study on the memorization and membership inference of ghost sentences, examining factors such as training data scales, model sizes, repetition times, insertion positions, wordlist of passphrases, alignment, etc. Our study shows the possibility of applying ghost sentences in real scenarios and provides instructions for the potential application.

Recent large language models (LLMs) in the general domain, such as ChatGPT, have shown remarkable success in following instructions and producing human-like responses. However, such language models have not been learned individually and carefully for the medical domain, resulting in poor diagnostic accuracy and inability to give correct recommendations for medical diagnosis, medications, etc. To address this issue, we collected more than 700 diseases and their corresponding symptoms, recommended medications, and required medical tests, and then generated 5K doctor-patient conversations. By fine-tuning models of doctor-patient conversations, these models emerge with great potential to understand patients' needs, provide informed advice, and offer valuable assistance in a variety of medical-related fields. The integration of these advanced language models into healthcare can revolutionize the way healthcare professionals and patients communicate, ultimately improving the overall quality of care and patient outcomes. In addition, we will open all source code, datasets and model weights to advance the further development of dialogue models in the medical field. In addition, the training data, code, and weights of this project are available at: https://github.com/Kent0n-Li/ChatDoctor.

This paper introduces 26 guiding principles designed to streamline the process of querying and prompting large language models. Our goal is to simplify the underlying concepts of formulating questions for various scales of large language models, examining their abilities, and enhancing user comprehension on the behaviors of different scales of large language models when feeding into different prompts. Extensive experiments are conducted on LLaMA-1/2 (7B, 13B and 70B), GPT-3.5/4 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed principles on instructions and prompts design. We hope that this work can provide a better guide for researchers working on the prompting of large language models. Project page is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ATLAS.

We are exposed to much information trying to influence us, such as teaser messages, debates, politically framed news, and propaganda - all of which use persuasive language. With the recent interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study the ability of LLMs to produce persuasive text. As opposed to prior work which focuses on particular domains or types of persuasion, we conduct a general study across various domains to measure and benchmark to what degree LLMs produce persuasive text - both when explicitly instructed to rewrite text to be more or less persuasive and when only instructed to paraphrase. To this end, we construct a new dataset, Persuasive-Pairs, of pairs each consisting of a short text and of a text rewritten by an LLM to amplify or diminish persuasive language. We multi-annotate the pairs on a relative scale for persuasive language. This data is not only a valuable resource in itself, but we also show that it can be used to train a regression model to predict a score of persuasive language between text pairs. This model can score and benchmark new LLMs across domains, thereby facilitating the comparison of different LLMs. Finally, we discuss effects observed for different system prompts. Notably, we find that different 'personas' in the system prompt of LLaMA3 change the persuasive language in the text substantially, even when only instructed to paraphrase. These findings underscore the importance of investigating persuasive language in LLM generated text.

The development and popularization of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns that they will be used to create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online. Early work has found that language models can generate content perceived as at least on par and often more persuasive than human-written messages. However, there is still limited knowledge about LLMs' persuasive capabilities in direct conversations with human counterparts and how personalization can improve their performance. In this pre-registered study, we analyze the effect of AI-driven persuasion in a controlled, harmless setting. We create a web-based platform where participants engage in short, multiple-round debates with a live opponent. Each participant is randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions, corresponding to a two-by-two factorial design: (1) Games are either played between two humans or between a human and an LLM; (2) Personalization might or might not be enabled, granting one of the two players access to basic sociodemographic information about their opponent. We found that participants who debated GPT-4 with access to their personal information had 81.7% (p < 0.01; N=820 unique participants) higher odds of increased agreement with their opponents compared to participants who debated humans. Without personalization, GPT-4 still outperforms humans, but the effect is lower and statistically non-significant (p=0.31). Overall, our results suggest that concerns around personalization are meaningful and have important implications for the governance of social media and the design of new online environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have recently gained significant attention in the domain of Recommendation Systems (RS). These models, trained on massive amounts of data using self-supervised learning, have demonstrated remarkable success in learning universal representations and have the potential to enhance various aspects of recommendation systems by some effective transfer techniques such as fine-tuning and prompt tuning, and so on. The crucial aspect of harnessing the power of language models in enhancing recommendation quality is the utilization of their high-quality representations of textual features and their extensive coverage of external knowledge to establish correlations between items and users. To provide a comprehensive understanding of the existing LLM-based recommendation systems, this survey presents a taxonomy that categorizes these models into two major paradigms, respectively Discriminative LLM for Recommendation (DLLM4Rec) and Generative LLM for Recommendation (GLLM4Rec), with the latter being systematically sorted out for the first time. Furthermore, we systematically review and analyze existing LLM-based recommendation systems within each paradigm, providing insights into their methodologies, techniques, and performance. Additionally, we identify key challenges and several valuable findings to provide researchers and practitioners with inspiration. We have also created a GitHub repository to index relevant papers on LLMs for recommendation, https://github.com/WLiK/LLM4Rec.

The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of Planck (person, mission, constant, institutions and more) without further clarification from the user. At ADS, we are applying modern machine learning and natural language processing techniques to our dataset of recent astronomy publications to train astroBERT, a deeply contextual language model based on research at Google. Using astroBERT, we aim to enrich the ADS dataset and improve its discoverability, and in particular we are developing our own named entity recognition tool. We present here our preliminary results and lessons learned.

People increasingly seek personal advice from large language models (LLMs), yet whether humans follow their advice, and its consequences for their well-being, remains unknown. In a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a representative UK sample (N = 2,302), 75% of participants who had a 20-minute discussion with GPT-4o about health, careers or relationships subsequently reported following its advice. Based on autograder evaluations of chat transcripts, LLM advice rarely violated safety best practice. When queried 2-3 weeks later, participants who had interacted with personalised AI (with access to detailed user information) followed its advice more often in the real world and reported higher well-being than those advised by non-personalised AI. However, while receiving personal advice from AI temporarily reduced well-being, no differential long-term effects compared to a control emerged. Our results suggest that humans readily follow LLM advice about personal issues but doing so shows no additional well-being benefit over casual conversations.

Misinformation spread in online social networks is an urgent-to-solve problem having harmful consequences that threaten human health, public safety, economics, and so on. In this study, we construct a novel dataset, called MiDe-22, having 5,284 English and 5,064 Turkish tweets with their misinformation labels under several recent events, including the Russia-Ukraine war, COVID-19 pandemic, and Refugees. Moreover, we provide the user engagements to the tweets in terms of likes, replies, retweets, and quotes. We present a detailed data analysis with descriptive statistics and temporal analysis, and provide the experimental results of a benchmark evaluation for misinformation detection on our novel dataset.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve, their ability to deliver personalized and context-aware responses offers transformative potential for improving user experiences. Existing personalization approaches, however, often rely solely on user history to augment the prompt, limiting their effectiveness in generating tailored outputs, especially in cold-start scenarios with sparse data. To address these limitations, we propose Personalized Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (PGraphRAG), a framework that leverages user-centric knowledge graphs to enrich personalization. By directly integrating structured user knowledge into the retrieval process and augmenting prompts with user-relevant context, PGraphRAG enhances contextual understanding and output quality. We also introduce the Personalized Graph-based Benchmark for Text Generation, designed to evaluate personalized text generation tasks in real-world settings where user history is sparse or unavailable. Experimental results show that PGraphRAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalization methods across diverse tasks, demonstrating the unique advantages of graph-based retrieval for personalization.

Working adults spend nearly one third of their daily time at their jobs. In this paper, we study job-related social media discourse from a community of users. We use both crowdsourcing and local expertise to train a classifier to detect job-related messages on Twitter. Additionally, we analyze the linguistic differences in a job-related corpus of tweets between individual users vs. commercial accounts. The volumes of job-related tweets from individual users indicate that people use Twitter with distinct monthly, daily, and hourly patterns. We further show that the moods associated with jobs, positive and negative, have unique diurnal rhythms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as personalized assistants for users across a wide range of tasks -- from offering writing support to delivering tailored recommendations or consultations. Over time, the interaction history between a user and an LLM can provide extensive information about an individual's traits and preferences. However, open questions remain on how well LLMs today can effectively leverage such history to (1) internalize the user's inherent traits and preferences, (2) track how the user profiling and preferences evolve over time, and (3) generate personalized responses accordingly in new scenarios. In this work, we introduce the PERSONAMEM benchmark. PERSONAMEM features curated user profiles with over 180 simulated user-LLM interaction histories, each containing up to 60 sessions of multi-turn conversations across 15 real-world tasks that require personalization. Given an in-situ user query, i.e. query issued by the user from the first-person perspective, we evaluate LLM chatbots' ability to identify the most suitable response according to the current state of the user's profile. We observe that current LLMs still struggle to recognize the dynamic evolution in users' profiles over time through direct prompting approaches. As a consequence, LLMs often fail to deliver responses that align with users' current situations and preferences, with frontier models such as GPT-4.1, o4-mini, GPT-4.5, o1, or Gemini-2.0 achieving only around 50% overall accuracy, suggesting room for improvement. We hope that PERSONAMEM, along with the user profile and conversation simulation pipeline, can facilitate future research in the development of truly user-aware chatbots. Code and data are available at github.com/bowen-upenn/PersonaMem.

Understanding the nuances of a user's extensive interaction history is key to building accurate and personalized natural language systems that can adapt to evolving user preferences. To address this, we introduce PERSOMA, Personalized Soft Prompt Adapter architecture. Unlike previous personalized prompting methods for large language models, PERSOMA offers a novel approach to efficiently capture user history. It achieves this by resampling and compressing interactions as free form text into expressive soft prompt embeddings, building upon recent research utilizing embedding representations as input for LLMs. We rigorously validate our approach by evaluating various adapter architectures, first-stage sampling strategies, parameter-efficient tuning techniques like LoRA, and other personalization methods. Our results demonstrate PERSOMA's superior ability to handle large and complex user histories compared to existing embedding-based and text-prompt-based techniques.

The Canadian air travel sector has seen a significant increase in flight delays, cancellations, and other issues concerning passenger rights. Recognizing this demand, we present a chatbot to assist passengers and educate them about their rights. Our system breaks a complex user input into simple queries which are used to retrieve information from a collection of documents detailing air travel regulations. The most relevant passages from these documents are presented along with links to the original documents and the generated queries, enabling users to dissect and leverage the information for their unique circumstances. The system successfully overcomes two predominant challenges: understanding complex user inputs, and delivering accurate answers, free of hallucinations, that passengers can rely on for making informed decisions. A user study comparing the chatbot to a Google search demonstrated the chatbot's usefulness and ease of use. Beyond the primary goal of providing accurate and timely information to air passengers regarding their rights, we hope that this system will also enable further research exploring the tradeoff between the user-friendly conversational interface of chatbots and the accuracy of retrieval systems.

Large language models demonstrate impressive reasoning abilities but struggle to provide personalized content due to their lack of individual user preference information. Existing methods, such as in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, fall short in capturing the complexity of human preferences, especially given the small, personal datasets individuals possess. In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing small parameter models as preference agents to generate natural language rules that guide a larger, pre-trained model, enabling efficient personalization. Our method involves a small, local "steering wheel" model that directs the outputs of a much larger foundation model, producing content tailored to an individual's preferences while leveraging the extensive knowledge and capabilities of the large model. Importantly, this personalization is achieved without the need to fine-tune the large model. Experimental results on email and article datasets, demonstrate that our technique significantly outperforms baseline personalization methods. By allowing foundation models to adapt to individual preferences in a data and compute-efficient manner, our approach paves the way for highly personalized language model applications.

This work explores the impact of moderation on users' enjoyment of conversational AI systems. While recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to highly capable conversational AIs that are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, there is a growing concern over AI safety and the need to moderate systems to encourage safe language and prevent harm. However, some users argue that current approaches to moderation limit the technology, compromise free expression, and limit the value delivered by the technology. This study takes an unbiased stance and shows that moderation does not necessarily detract from user enjoyment. Heavy handed moderation does seem to have a nefarious effect, but models that are moderated to be safer can lead to a better user experience. By deploying various conversational AIs in the Chai platform, the study finds that user retention can increase with a level of moderation and safe system design. These results demonstrate the importance of appropriately defining safety in models in a way that is both responsible and focused on serving users.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating contextually relevant content. However, tailoring these outputs to individual users for effective personalization is a significant challenge. While rich user-specific information often exists as pre-existing user representations, such as embeddings learned from preferences or behaviors, current methods to leverage these for LLM personalization typically require costly fine-tuning or token-heavy prompting. We propose Embedding-to-Prefix (E2P), a parameter-efficient method that injects pre-computed context embeddings into an LLM's hidden representation space through a learned projection to a single soft token prefix. This enables effective personalization while keeping the backbone model frozen and avoiding expensive adaptation techniques. We evaluate E2P across two public datasets and in a production setting: dialogue personalization on Persona-Chat, contextual headline generation on PENS, and large-scale personalization for music and podcast consumption. Results show that E2P preserves contextual signals and achieves strong performance with minimal computational overhead, offering a scalable, efficient solution for contextualizing generative AI systems.

Successfully handling context is essential for any dialog understanding task. This context maybe be conversational (relying on previous user queries or system responses), visual (relying on what the user sees, for example, on their screen), or background (based on signals such as a ringing alarm or playing music). In this work, we present an overview of MARRS, or Multimodal Reference Resolution System, an on-device framework within a Natural Language Understanding system, responsible for handling conversational, visual and background context. In particular, we present different machine learning models to enable handing contextual queries; specifically, one to enable reference resolution, and one to handle context via query rewriting. We also describe how these models complement each other to form a unified, coherent, lightweight system that can understand context while preserving user privacy.

Recent interest in human-AI interactions in agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) has grown rapidly due to the widespread utilization of large language models (LLMs). ABMS is an intelligent approach that simulates autonomous agents' behaviors within a defined environment to research emergent phenomena. Integrating LLMs into ABMS enables natural language interaction between humans and models. Meanwhile, it introduces new challenges that rely on human interaction to address. Human involvement can assist ABMS in adapting to flexible and complex research demands. However, systematic reviews of interactions that examine how humans and AI interact in ABMS are lacking. In this paper, we investigate existing works and propose a novel taxonomy to categorize the interactions derived from them. Specifically, human users refer to researchers who utilize ABMS tools to conduct their studies in our survey. We decompose interactions into five dimensions: the goals that users want to achieve (Why), the phases that users are involved (When), the components of the system (What), the roles of users (Who), and the means of interactions (How). Our analysis summarizes the findings that reveal existing interaction patterns. They provide researchers who develop interactions with comprehensive guidance on how humans and AI interact. We further discuss the unexplored interactions and suggest future research directions.

This paper provides a primer on Large Language Models (LLMs) and identifies their strengths, limitations, applications and research directions. It is intended to be useful to those in academia and industry who are interested in gaining an understanding of the key LLM concepts and technologies, and in utilising this knowledge in both day to day tasks and in more complex scenarios where this technology can enhance current practices and processes.

Large language models (LLMs) have not only revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to bring a paradigm shift in many other fields due to their remarkable abilities of language understanding, as well as impressive generalization capabilities and reasoning skills. As a result, recent studies have actively attempted to harness the power of LLMs to improve recommender systems, and it is imperative to thoroughly review the recent advances and challenges of LLM-based recommender systems. Unlike existing work, this survey does not merely analyze the classifications of LLM-based recommendation systems according to the technical framework of LLMs. Instead, it investigates how LLMs can better serve recommendation tasks from the perspective of the recommender system community, thus enhancing the integration of large language models into the research of recommender system and its practical application. In addition, the long-standing gap between academic research and industrial applications related to recommender systems has not been well discussed, especially in the era of large language models. In this review, we introduce a novel taxonomy that originates from the intrinsic essence of recommendation, delving into the application of large language model-based recommendation systems and their industrial implementation. Specifically, we propose a three-tier structure that more accurately reflects the developmental progression of recommendation systems from research to practical implementation, including representing and understanding, scheming and utilizing, and industrial deployment. Furthermore, we discuss critical challenges and opportunities in this emerging field. A more up-to-date version of the papers is maintained at: https://github.com/jindongli-Ai/Next-Generation-LLM-based-Recommender-Systems-Survey.

Personalized chatbots focus on endowing chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users, give more informative responses, and further act as personal assistants. Existing personalized approaches tried to incorporate several text descriptions as explicit user profiles. However, the acquisition of such explicit profiles is expensive and time-consuming, thus being impractical for large-scale real-world applications. Moreover, the restricted predefined profile neglects the language behavior of a real user and cannot be automatically updated together with the change of user interests. In this paper, we propose to learn implicit user profiles automatically from large-scale user dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. Specifically, leveraging the benefits of Transformer on language understanding, we train a personalized language model to construct a general user profile from the user's historical responses. To highlight the relevant historical responses to the input post, we further establish a key-value memory network of historical post-response pairs, and build a dynamic post-aware user profile. The dynamic profile mainly describes what and how the user has responded to similar posts in history. To explicitly utilize users' frequently used words, we design a personalized decoder to fuse two decoding strategies, including generating a word from the generic vocabulary and copying one word from the user's personalized vocabulary. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the significant improvement of our model compared with existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhengyima/DHAP

This paper presents our efforts to democratize ChatGPT across language. We release a large language model "Phoenix", achieving competitive performance among open-source English and Chinese models while excelling in languages with limited resources (covering both Latin and non-Latin languages). We believe this work will be beneficial to make ChatGPT more accessible, especially in countries where people cannot use ChatGPT due to restrictions from OpenAI or local goverments. Our data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/LLMZoo.

This paper highlights the importance of personalization in large language models and introduces the LaMP benchmark -- a novel benchmark for training and evaluating language models for producing personalized outputs. LaMP offers a comprehensive evaluation framework with diverse language tasks and multiple entries for each user profile. It consists of seven personalized tasks, spanning three text classification and four text generation tasks. We additionally propose two retrieval augmentation approaches that retrieve personal items from each user profile for personalizing language model outputs. To this aim, we study various retrieval models, including term matching, semantic matching, and time-aware methods. Extensive experiments on LaMP for zero-shot and fine-tuned language models demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed retrieval augmentation approach and highlight the impact of personalization in various natural language tasks.

With increasing usage of generative models for text generation and widespread use of machine generated texts in various domains, being able to distinguish between human written and machine generated texts is a significant challenge. While existing models and proprietary systems focus on identifying whether given text is entirely human written or entirely machine generated, only a few systems provide insights at sentence or paragraph level at likelihood of being machine generated at a non reliable accuracy level, working well only for a set of domains and generators. This paper introduces few reliable approaches for the novel task of identifying which part of a given text is machine generated at a word level while comparing results from different approaches and methods. We present a comparison with proprietary systems , performance of our model on unseen domains' and generators' texts. The findings reveal significant improvements in detection accuracy along with comparison on other aspects of detection capabilities. Finally we discuss potential avenues for improvement and implications of our work. The proposed model is also well suited for detecting which parts of a text are machine generated in outputs of Instruct variants of many LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) chatbots like ChatGPT are increasingly used for mental health support. They offer accessible, therapeutic support but also raise concerns about misinformation, over-reliance, and risks in high-stakes contexts of mental health. We crowdsource large-scale users' posts from six major social media platforms to examine how people discuss their interactions with LLM chatbots across different mental health conditions. Through an LLM-assisted pipeline grounded in Value-Sensitive Design (VSD), we mapped the relationships across user-reported sentiments, mental health conditions, perspectives, and values. Our results reveal that the use of LLM chatbots is condition-specific. Users with neurodivergent conditions (e.g., ADHD, ASD) report strong positive sentiments and instrumental or appraisal support, whereas higher-risk disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder) show more negative sentiments. We further uncover how user perspectives co-occur with underlying values, such as identity, autonomy, and privacy. Finally, we discuss shifting from "one-size-fits-all" chatbot design toward condition-specific, value-sensitive LLM design.

Following the 2016 US presidential election, there has been an increased focus on politically-motivated manipulation of mass-user behavior on social media platforms. Since a large volume of political discussion occurs on these platforms, identifying malicious activity and coordinated campaigns is essential to ensuring a robust democratic environment. Twitter has become a critical communication channel for politicians and other public figures, enabling them to maintain a direct relationship with supporters. However, the platform has been fertile ground for large-scale malicious activity. As the 2020 U.S. presidential election approaches, we have developed tools to monitor follower dynamics of some of the most prominent Twitter users, including U.S. presidential candidates. We investigate numerous, strange phenomena, such as dramatic spike and saw-tooth waveforms on follower-count charts; cohorts of user accounts which 'circulate', i.e., re-follow high profile accounts numerous times; and other 'resurrected' accounts, which have recently re-engaged on Twitter after years of non-activity. So through various analyses in these contexts, we reveal multiple, coordinated 'social' targeting campaigns aimed at affecting the outcomes of socially critical events through the use of networks of social automations (bots), often optimizing their social capital through 'compromised' accounts, which have--unbeknownst to the greater world--been hijacked.

Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse advancements across multiple aspects, recent research fails to successfully incorporate feedback from the users. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of system-user conversational interaction data. To this end, we propose a user simulator-based framework for multi-turn interactions with a variety of mixed-initiative CS systems. Specifically, we develop a user simulator, dubbed ConvSim, that, once initialized with an information need description, is capable of providing feedback to a system's responses, as well as answering potential clarifying questions. Our experiments on a wide variety of state-of-the-art passage retrieval and neural re-ranking models show that effective utilization of user feedback can lead to 16% retrieval performance increase in terms of nDCG@3. Moreover, we observe consistent improvements as the number of feedback rounds increases (35% relative improvement in terms of nDCG@3 after three rounds). This points to a research gap in the development of specific feedback processing modules and opens a potential for significant advancements in CS. To support further research in the topic, we release over 30,000 transcripts of system-simulator interactions based on well-established CS datasets.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made a transformative impact. However, the potential that LLMs such as ChatGPT can be exploited to generate misinformation has posed a serious concern to online safety and public trust. A fundamental research question is: will LLM-generated misinformation cause more harm than human-written misinformation? We propose to tackle this question from the perspective of detection difficulty. We first build a taxonomy of LLM-generated misinformation. Then we categorize and validate the potential real-world methods for generating misinformation with LLMs. Then, through extensive empirical investigation, we discover that LLM-generated misinformation can be harder to detect for humans and detectors compared to human-written misinformation with the same semantics, which suggests it can have more deceptive styles and potentially cause more harm. We also discuss the implications of our discovery on combating misinformation in the age of LLMs and the countermeasures.