David F. Jenny

David F. Jenny, Yann Billeter, Mrinmaya Sachan et al. · eth-zurich

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked intense debate regarding the prevalence of bias in these models and its mitigation. Yet, as exemplified by both results on debiasing methods in the literature and reports of alignment-related defects from the wider community, bias remains a poorly understood topic despite its practical relevance. To enhance the understanding of the internal causes of bias, we analyse LLM bias through the lens of causal fairness analysis, which enables us to both comprehend the origins of bias and reason about its downstream consequences and mitigation. To operationalize this framework, we propose a prompt-based method for the extraction of confounding and mediating attributes which contribute to the LLM decision process. By applying Activity Dependency Networks (ADNs), we then analyse how these attributes influence an LLM's decision process. We apply our method to LLM ratings of argument quality in political debates. We find that the observed disparate treatment can at least in part be attributed to confounding and mitigating attributes and model misalignment, and discuss the consequences of our findings for human-AI alignment and bias mitigation. Our code and data are at https://github.com/david-jenny/LLM-Political-Study.

Till Aczel, David F. Jenny, Simon Bührer et al.

Neural image codecs achieve higher compression ratios than traditional hand-crafted methods such as PNG or JPEG-XL, but often incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their deployment on energy-constrained devices such as smartphones, cameras, and drones. We propose Grayscale Image Compression with Differentiable Logic Circuits (GIC-DLC), a hardware-aware codec where we train lookup tables to combine the flexibility of neural networks with the efficiency of Boolean operations. Experiments on grayscale benchmark datasets show that GIC-DLC outperforms traditional codecs in compression efficiency while allowing substantial reductions in energy consumption and latency. These results demonstrate that learned compression can be hardware-friendly, offering a promising direction for low-power image compression on edge devices.