John Pavlopoulos

Dimitris Tsirmpas, John Pavlopoulos

Current annotation agreement metrics are not well-suited for inter-group analysis, are sensitive to group size imbalances and restricted to single-annotation settings. These restrictions render them insufficient for many subjective tasks such as toxicity and hate-speech detection. For this reason, we introduce a quantifiable metric, paired with a statistical significance test, that attributes polarization to various annotator groups. Our metric enables direct comparisons between heavily imbalanced sociodemographic and ideological subgroups across different datasets and tasks, while also enabling analysis on multi-label settings. We apply this metric to three datasets on hate speech, and one on toxicity detection, discovering that: (1) Polarization is strongly and persistently attributed to annotator race, especially on the hate speech task. (2) Religious annotators do not fundamentally disagree with each other, but do with other annotators, a trend that is gradually diminished and then reversed with irreligious annotators. (3) Less educated annotators are more subjective, while educated ones tend to broadly agree more between themselves. Overall, our results reflect current findings around annotation patterns for various subgroups. Finally, we estimate the minimum number of annotators needed to obtain robust results, and provide an open-source Python library that implements our metric.

Korbinian Randl, Guido Rocchietti, Aron Henriksson et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems combine dense retrievers and language models to ground LLM outputs in retrieved documents. However, the opacity of how these components interact creates challenges for deployment in high-stakes domains. We present RAG-E, an end-to-end explainability framework that quantifies retriever-generator alignment through mathematically grounded attribution methods. Our approach adapts Integrated Gradients for retriever analysis, introduces PMCSHAP, a Monte Carlo-stabilized Shapley Value approximation, for generator attribution, and introduces the Weighted Attribution-Relevance Gap (WARG) metric to measure how well a generator's document usage aligns with a retriever's ranking. Empirical analysis on TREC CAsT and FoodSafeSum reveals critical misalignments: for 47.4% to 66.7% of queries, generators ignore the retriever's top-ranked documents, while 48.1% to 65.9% rely on documents ranked as less relevant. These failure modes demonstrate that RAG output quality depends not solely on individual component performance but on their interplay, which can be audited via RAG-E.

Aggelos Semoglou, John Pavlopoulos

Clustering is widely used for unsupervised structure discovery, yet it offers limited insight into how reliable each individual assignment is. Diagnostics, such as convergence behavior or objective values, may reflect global quality, but they do not indicate whether particular instances are assigned confidently, especially for initialization-sensitive algorithms like k-means. This assignment-level instability can undermine both accuracy and robustness. Ensemble approaches improve global consistency by aggregating multiple runs, but they typically lack tools for quantifying pointwise confidence in a way that combines cross-run agreement with geometric support from the learned cluster structure. We introduce CAKE (Confidence in Assignments via K-partition Ensembles), a framework that evaluates each point using two complementary statistics computed over a clustering ensemble: assignment stability and consistency of local geometric fit. These are combined into a single, interpretable score in [0,1]. Our theoretical analysis shows that CAKE remains effective under noise and separates stable from unstable points. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets indicate that CAKE effectively highlights ambiguous points and stable core members, providing a confidence ranking that can guide filtering or prioritization to improve clustering quality.