Yahang Qi

Zhijing Jin, Nils Heil, Jiarui Liu et al.

Implicit Personalization (IP) is a phenomenon of language models inferring a user's background from the implicit cues in the input prompts and tailoring the response based on this inference. While previous work has touched upon various instances of this problem, there lacks a unified framework to study this behavior. This work systematically studies IP through a rigorous mathematical formulation, a multi-perspective moral reasoning framework, and a set of case studies. Our theoretical foundation for IP relies on a structural causal model and introduces a novel method, indirect intervention, to estimate the causal effect of a mediator variable that cannot be directly intervened upon. Beyond the technical approach, we also introduce a set of moral reasoning principles based on three schools of moral philosophy to study when IP may or may not be ethically appropriate. Equipped with both mathematical and ethical insights, we present three diverse case studies illustrating the varied nature of the IP problem and offer recommendations for future research. Our code is at https://github.com/jiarui-liu/IP, and our data is at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Jerry999/ImplicitPersonalizationData.

Yahang Qi, Bernhard Schölkopf, Zhijing Jin

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems increasingly influence decision-making across various fields, the need to attribute responsibility for undesirable outcomes has become essential, though complicated by the complex interplay between humans and AI. Existing attribution methods based on actual causality and Shapley values tend to disproportionately blame agents who contribute more to an outcome and rely on real-world measures of blameworthiness that may misalign with responsible AI standards. This paper presents a causal framework using Structural Causal Models (SCMs) to systematically attribute responsibility in human-AI systems, measuring overall blameworthiness while employing counterfactual reasoning to account for agents' expected epistemic levels. Two case studies illustrate the framework's adaptability in diverse human-AI collaboration scenarios.