IRAug 15, 2024
Web Retrieval Agents for Evidence-Based Misinformation DetectionJacob-Junqi Tian, Hao Yu, Yury Orlovskiy et al.
This paper develops an agent-based automated fact-checking approach for detecting misinformation. We demonstrate that combining a powerful LLM agent, which does not have access to the internet for searches, with an online web search agent yields better results than when each tool is used independently. Our approach is robust across multiple models, outperforming alternatives and increasing the macro F1 of misinformation detection by as much as 20 percent compared to LLMs without search. We also conduct extensive analyses on the sources our system leverages and their biases, decisions in the construction of the system like the search tool and the knowledge base, the type of evidence needed and its impact on the results, and other parts of the overall process. By combining strong performance with in-depth understanding, we hope to provide building blocks for future search-enabled misinformation mitigation systems.
LGOct 30, 2025
Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote WorkMantas Mazeika, Alice Gatti, Cristina Menghini et al.
AIs have made rapid progress on research-oriented benchmarks of knowledge and reasoning, but it remains unclear how these gains translate into economic value and automation. To measure this, we introduce the Remote Labor Index (RLI), a broadly multi-sector benchmark comprising real-world, economically valuable projects designed to evaluate end-to-end agent performance in practical settings. AI agents perform near the floor on RLI, with the highest-performing agent achieving an automation rate of 2.5%. These results help ground discussions of AI automation in empirical evidence, setting a common basis for tracking AI impacts and enabling stakeholders to proactively navigate AI-driven labor automation.
AIFeb 26
LLM Novice Uplift on Dual-Use, In Silico Biology TasksChen Bo Calvin Zhang, Christina Q. Knight, Nicholas Kruus et al.
Large language models (LLMs) perform increasingly well on biology benchmarks, but it remains unclear whether they uplift novice users -- i.e., enable humans to perform better than with internet-only resources. This uncertainty is central to understanding both scientific acceleration and dual-use risk. We conducted a multi-model, multi-benchmark human uplift study comparing novices with LLM access versus internet-only access across eight biosecurity-relevant task sets. Participants worked on complex problems with ample time (up to 13 hours for the most involved tasks). We found that LLM access provided substantial uplift: novices with LLMs were 4.16 times more accurate than controls (95% CI [2.63, 6.87]). On four benchmarks with available expert baselines (internet-only), novices with LLMs outperformed experts on three of them. Perhaps surprisingly, standalone LLMs often exceeded LLM-assisted novices, indicating that users were not eliciting the strongest available contributions from the LLMs. Most participants (89.6%) reported little difficulty obtaining dual-use-relevant information despite safeguards. Overall, LLMs substantially uplift novices on biological tasks previously reserved for trained practitioners, underscoring the need for sustained, interactive uplift evaluations alongside traditional benchmarks.
CLOct 11, 2024
SimpleStrat: Diversifying Language Model Generation with StratificationJustin Wong, Yury Orlovskiy, Michael Luo et al.
Generating diverse responses from large language models (LLMs) is crucial for applications such as planning/search and synthetic data generation, where diversity provides distinct answers across generations. Prior approaches rely on increasing temperature to increase diversity. However, contrary to popular belief, we show not only does this approach produce lower quality individual generations as temperature increases, but it depends on model's next-token probabilities being similar to the true distribution of answers. We propose SimpleStrat, an alternative approach that uses the language model itself to partition the space into strata. At inference, a random stratum is selected and a sample drawn from within the strata. To measure diversity, we introduce CoverageQA, a dataset of underspecified questions with multiple equally plausible answers, and assess diversity by measuring KL Divergence between the output distribution and uniform distribution over valid ground truth answers. As computing probability per response/solution for proprietary models is infeasible, we measure recall on ground truth solutions. Our evaluation show using SimpleStrat achieves higher recall by 0.05 compared to GPT-4o and 0.36 average reduction in KL Divergence compared to Llama 3.
CLJan 2, 2024
Uncertainty Resolution in Misinformation DetectionYury Orlovskiy, Camille Thibault, Anne Imouza et al.
Misinformation poses a variety of risks, such as undermining public trust and distorting factual discourse. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have been shown effective in mitigating misinformation, particularly in handling statements where enough context is provided. However, they struggle to assess ambiguous or context-deficient statements accurately. This work introduces a new method to resolve uncertainty in such statements. We propose a framework to categorize missing information and publish category labels for the LIAR-New dataset, which is adaptable to cross-domain content with missing information. We then leverage this framework to generate effective user queries for missing context. Compared to baselines, our method improves the rate at which generated questions are answerable by the user by 38 percentage points and classification performance by over 10 percentage points macro F1. Thus, this approach may provide a valuable component for future misinformation mitigation pipelines.