AIOct 25, 2025
Measure what Matters: Psychometric Evaluation of AI with Situational Judgment TestsAlexandra Yost, Shreyans Jain, Shivam Raval et al.
AI psychometrics evaluates AI systems in roles that traditionally require emotional judgment and ethical consideration. Prior work often reuses human trait inventories (Big Five, \hexaco) or ad hoc personas, limiting behavioral realism and domain relevance. We propose a framework that (1) uses situational judgment tests (SJTs) from realistic scenarios to probe domain-specific competencies; (2) integrates industrial-organizational and personality psychology to design sophisticated personas which include behavioral and psychological descriptors, life history, and social and emotional functions; and (3) employs structured generation with population demographic priors and memoir inspired narratives, encoded with Pydantic schemas. In a law enforcement assistant case study, we construct a rich dataset of personas drawn across 8 persona archetypes and SJTs across 11 attributes, and analyze behaviors across subpopulation and scenario slices. The dataset spans 8,500 personas, 4,000 SJTs, and 300,000 responses. We will release the dataset and all code to the public.
LGOct 5, 2025
Variational Diffusion Unlearning: A Variational Inference Framework for Unlearning in Diffusion Models under Data ConstraintsSubhodip Panda, MS Varun, Shreyans Jain et al.
For a responsible and safe deployment of diffusion models in various domains, regulating the generated outputs from these models is desirable because such models could generate undesired, violent, and obscene outputs. To tackle this problem, recent works use machine unlearning methodology to forget training data points containing these undesired features from pre-trained generative models. However, these methods proved to be ineffective in data-constrained settings where the whole training dataset is inaccessible. Thus, the principal objective of this work is to propose a machine unlearning methodology that can prevent the generation of outputs containing undesired features from a pre-trained diffusion model in such a data-constrained setting. Our proposed method, termed as Variational Diffusion Unlearning (VDU), is a computationally efficient method that only requires access to a subset of training data containing undesired features. Our approach is inspired by the variational inference framework with the objective of minimizing a loss function consisting of two terms: plasticity inducer and stability regularizer. Plasticity inducer reduces the log-likelihood of the undesired training data points, while the stability regularizer, essential for preventing loss of image generation quality, regularizes the model in parameter space. We validate the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive experiments for both class unlearning and feature unlearning. For class unlearning, we unlearn some user-identified classes from MNIST, CIFAR-10, and tinyImageNet datasets from a pre-trained unconditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM). Similarly, for feature unlearning, we unlearn the generation of certain high-level features from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model
AIAug 26, 2025
Sycophancy as compositions of Atomic Psychometric TraitsShreyans Jain, Alexandra Yost, Amirali Abdullah
Sycophancy is a key behavioral risk in LLMs, yet is often treated as an isolated failure mode that occurs via a single causal mechanism. We instead propose modeling it as geometric and causal compositions of psychometric traits such as emotionality, openness, and agreeableness - similar to factor decomposition in psychometrics. Using Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), we map activation directions to these factors and study how different combinations may give rise to sycophancy (e.g., high extraversion combined with low conscientiousness). This perspective allows for interpretable and compositional vector-based interventions like addition, subtraction and projection; that may be used to mitigate safety-critical behaviors in LLMs.
CVNov 8, 2024
WavShadow: Wavelet Based Shadow Segmentation and RemovalShreyans Jain, Viraj Vekaria, Karan Gandhi et al.
Shadow removal and segmentation remain challenging tasks in computer vision, particularly in complex real world scenarios. This study presents a novel approach that enhances the ShadowFormer model by incorporating Masked Autoencoder (MAE) priors and Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC) blocks, leading to significantly faster convergence and improved performance. We introduce key innovations: (1) integration of MAE priors trained on Places2 dataset for better context understanding, (2) adoption of Haar wavelet features for enhanced edge detection and multiscale analysis, and (3) implementation of a modified SAM Adapter for robust shadow segmentation. Extensive experiments on the challenging DESOBA dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state of the art results, with notable improvements in both convergence speed and shadow removal quality.