Nayeli Suseth Bravo

Jingchao Fang, Nikos Arechiga, Keiichi Namaoshi et al.

The Wizard of Oz (WoZ) method is a widely adopted research approach where a human Wizard ``role-plays'' a not readily available technology and interacts with participants to elicit user behaviors and probe the design space. With the growing ability for modern large language models (LLMs) to role-play, one can apply LLMs as Wizards in WoZ experiments with better scalability and lower cost than the traditional approach. However, methodological guidance on responsibly applying LLMs in WoZ experiments and a systematic evaluation of LLMs' role-playing ability are lacking. Through two LLM-powered WoZ studies, we take the first step towards identifying an experiment lifecycle for researchers to safely integrate LLMs into WoZ experiments and interpret data generated from settings that involve Wizards role-played by LLMs. We also contribute a heuristic-based evaluation framework that allows the estimation of LLMs' role-playing ability in WoZ experiments and reveals LLMs' behavior patterns at scale.

Sumanta Bhattacharyya, Francine Chen, Scott Carter et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel academically but struggle with social intelligence tasks, such as creating good compromises. In this paper, we present methods for generating empathically neutral compromises between two opposing viewpoints. We first compared four different prompt engineering methods using Claude 3 Opus and a dataset of 2,400 contrasting views on shared places. A subset of the gen erated compromises was evaluated for acceptability in a 50-participant study. We found that the best method for generating compromises between two views used external empathic similarity between a compromise and each viewpoint as iterative feedback, outperforming stan dard Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning. The results indicate that the use of empathic neutrality improves the acceptability of compromises. The dataset of generated compromises was then used to train two smaller foundation models via margin-based alignment of human preferences, improving efficiency and removing the need for empathy estimation during inference.