Léo Laugier

Angelika Romanou, Syrielle Montariol, Debjit Paul et al.

Understanding narratives requires reasoning about the cause-and-effect relationships between events mentioned in the text. While existing foundation models yield impressive results in many NLP tasks requiring reasoning, it is unclear whether they understand the complexity of the underlying network of causal relationships of events in narratives. In this work, we present CRAB, a new Causal Reasoning Assessment Benchmark designed to evaluate causal understanding of events in real-world narratives. CRAB contains fine-grained, contextual causality annotations for ~2.7K pairs of real-world events that describe various newsworthy event timelines (e.g., the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk). Using CRAB, we measure the performance of several large language models, demonstrating that most systems achieve poor performance on the task. Motivated by classical causal principles, we also analyze the causal structures of groups of events in CRAB, and find that models perform worse on causal reasoning when events are derived from complex causal structures compared to simple linear causal chains. We make our dataset and code available to the research community.

Léo Laugier, Raghuram Vadapalli, Thomas Bonald et al.

This paper explores a novel application of textual semantic similarity to user-preference representation for rating prediction. The approach represents a user's preferences as a graph of textual snippets from review text, where the edges are defined by semantic similarity. This textual, memory-based approach to rating prediction enables review-based explanations for recommendations. The method is evaluated quantitatively, highlighting that leveraging text in this way outperforms both strong memory-based and model-based collaborative filtering baselines.

Crystal Qian, Vivian Tsai, Michael Behr et al.

Social and behavioral scientists increasingly aim to study how humans interact, collaborate, and make decisions alongside artificial intelligence. However, the experimental infrastructure for such work remains underdeveloped: (1) few platforms support real-time, multi-party studies at scale; (2) most deployments require bespoke engineering, limiting replicability and accessibility, and (3) existing tools do not treat AI agents as first-class participants. We present Deliberate Lab, an open-source platform for large-scale, real-time behavioral experiments that supports both human participants and large language model (LLM)-based agents. We report on a 12-month public deployment of the platform (N=88 experimenters, N=9195 experiment participants), analyzing usage patterns and workflows. Case studies and usage scenarios are aggregated from platform users, complemented by in-depth interviews with select experimenters. By lowering technical barriers and standardizing support for hybrid human-AI experimentation, Deliberate Lab expands the methodological repertoire for studying collective decision-making and human-centered AI.

Alexandros Xenos, John Pavlopoulos, Ion Androutsopoulos et al.

User posts whose perceived toxicity depends on the conversational context are rare in current toxicity detection datasets. Hence, toxicity detectors trained on existing datasets will also tend to disregard context, making the detection of context-sensitive toxicity harder when it does occur. We construct and publicly release a dataset of 10,000 posts with two kinds of toxicity labels: (i) annotators considered each post with the previous one as context; and (ii) annotators had no additional context. Based on this, we introduce a new task, context sensitivity estimation, which aims to identify posts whose perceived toxicity changes if the context (previous post) is also considered. We then evaluate machine learning systems on this task, showing that classifiers of practical quality can be developed, and we show that data augmentation with knowledge distillation can improve the performance further. Such systems could be used to enhance toxicity detection datasets with more context-dependent posts, or to suggest when moderators should consider the parent posts, which often may be unnecessary and may otherwise introduce significant additional cost.

Leo Laugier, John Pavlopoulos, Jeffrey Sorensen et al.

Platforms that support online commentary, from social networks to news sites, are increasingly leveraging machine learning to assist their moderation efforts. But this process does not typically provide feedback to the author that would help them contribute according to the community guidelines. This is prohibitively time-consuming for human moderators to do, and computational approaches are still nascent. This work focuses on models that can help suggest rephrasings of toxic comments in a more civil manner. Inspired by recent progress in unpaired sequence-to-sequence tasks, a self-supervised learning model is introduced, called CAE-T5. CAE-T5 employs a pre-trained text-to-text transformer, which is fine tuned with a denoising and cyclic auto-encoder loss. Experimenting with the largest toxicity detection dataset to date (Civil Comments) our model generates sentences that are more fluent and better at preserving the initial content compared to earlier text style transfer systems which we compare with using several scoring systems and human evaluation.

Leo Laugier, Daniil Bash, Jose Recatala et al.

We introduce the use of Crystal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (CGCNN), Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNN) and XGBoost to predict thermoelectric properties. The dataset for the CGCNN is independent of Density Functional Theory (DFT) and only relies on the crystal and atomic information, while that for the FCNN is based on a rich attribute list mined from Materialsproject.org. The results show that the optimized FCNN is three layer deep and is able to predict the scattering-time independent thermoelectric powerfactor much better than the CGCNN (or XGBoost), suggesting that bonding and density of states descriptors informed from materials science knowledge obtained partially from DFT are vital to predict functional properties.