Jaroslaw Szlichta

Joel Rorseth, Parke Godfrey, Lukasz Golab et al.

This paper demonstrates RAGE, an interactive tool for explaining Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval capabilities; i.e., able to query external sources and pull relevant information into their input context. Our explanations are counterfactual in the sense that they identify parts of the input context that, when removed, change the answer to the question posed to the LLM. RAGE includes pruning methods to navigate the vast space of possible explanations, allowing users to view the provenance of the produced answers.

Kiarash Golzadeh, Lukasz Golab, Jaroslaw Szlichta

Expert search and team formation systems operate on collaboration networks, with nodes representing individuals, labeled with their skills, and edges denoting collaboration relationships. Given a keyword query corresponding to the desired skills, these systems identify experts that best match the query. However, state-of-the-art solutions to this problem lack transparency. To address this issue, we propose ExES, a tool designed to explain expert search and team formation systems using factual and counterfactual methods from the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). ExES uses factual explanations to highlight important skills and collaborations, and counterfactual explanations to suggest new skills and collaborations to increase the likelihood of being identified as an expert. Towards a practical deployment as an interactive explanation tool, we present and experimentally evaluate a suite of pruning strategies to speed up the explanation search. In many cases, our pruning strategies make ExES an order of magnitude faster than exhaustive search, while still producing concise and actionable explanations.

Bahare Askari, Jaroslaw Szlichta, Amirali Salehi-Abari

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have recently shown promising performance in collaborative filtering with implicit feedback. These existing recommendation models learn user representations to reconstruct or predict user preferences. We introduce joint variational autoencoders (JoVA), an ensemble of two VAEs, in which VAEs jointly learn both user and item representations and collectively reconstruct and predict user preferences. This design allows JoVA to capture user-user and item-item correlations simultaneously. By extending the objective function of JoVA with a hinge-based pairwise loss function (JoVA-Hinge), we further specialize it for top-k recommendation with implicit feedback. Our extensive experiments on several real-world datasets show that JoVA-Hinge outperforms a broad set of state-of-the-art collaborative filtering methods, under a variety of commonly-used metrics. Our empirical results also confirm the outperformance of JoVA-Hinge over existing methods for cold-start users with a limited number of training data.