András Strausz

Zhijing Jin, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Giorgio Piatti et al.

We evaluate the moral alignment of LLMs with human preferences in multilingual trolley problems. Building on the Moral Machine experiment, which captures over 40 million human judgments across 200+ countries, we develop a cross-lingual corpus of moral dilemma vignettes in over 100 languages called MultiTP. This dataset enables the assessment of LLMs' decision-making processes in diverse linguistic contexts. Our analysis explores the alignment of 19 different LLMs with human judgments, capturing preferences across six moral dimensions: species, gender, fitness, status, age, and the number of lives involved. By correlating these preferences with the demographic distribution of language speakers and examining the consistency of LLM responses to various prompt paraphrasings, our findings provide insights into cross-lingual and ethical biases of LLMs and their intersection. We discover significant variance in alignment across languages, challenging the assumption of uniform moral reasoning in AI systems and highlighting the importance of incorporating diverse perspectives in AI ethics. The results underscore the need for further research on the integration of multilingual dimensions in responsible AI research to ensure fair and equitable AI interactions worldwide. Our code and data are at https://github.com/causalNLP/moralmachine

András Strausz, Niels Pardon, Ioana Giurgiu

Lakehouse systems enable the same data to be queried with multiple execution engines. However, selecting the engine best suited to run a SQL query still requires a priori knowledge of the query computational requirements and an engine capability, a complex and manual task that only becomes more difficult with the emergence of new engines and workloads. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a cross-engine optimizer that can automate engine selection for diverse SQL queries through a learned cost model. Optimized with hints, a query plan is used for query cost prediction and routing. Cost prediction is formulated as a multi-task learning problem, and multiple predictor heads, corresponding to different engines and provisionings, are used in the model architecture. This eliminates the need to train engine-specific models and allows the flexible addition of new engines at a minimal fine-tuning cost. Results on various databases and engines show that using a query optimized logical plan for cost estimation decreases the average Q-error by even 12.6% over using unoptimized plans as input. Moreover, the proposed cross-engine optimizer reduces the total workload runtime by up to 25.2% in a zero-shot setting and 30.4% in a few-shot setting when compared to random routing.