Lovenya Jain

Ishika Joshi, Ritvik Budhiraja, Pranav Deepak Tanna et al.

The rise in popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has prompted discussions in academic circles, with students exploring LLM-based tools for coursework inquiries and instructors exploring them for teaching and research. Even though a lot of work is underway to create LLM-based tools tailored for students and instructors, there is a lack of comprehensive user studies that capture the perspectives of students and instructors regarding LLMs. This paper addresses this gap by conducting surveys and interviews within undergraduate engineering universities in India. Using 1306 survey responses among students, 112 student interviews, and 27 instructor interviews around the academic usage of ChatGPT (a popular LLM), this paper offers insights into the current usage patterns, perceived benefits, threats, and challenges, as well as recommendations for enhancing the adoption of LLMs among students and instructors. These insights are further utilized to discuss the practical implications of LLMs in undergraduate engineering education and beyond.

Lovenya Jain, Pooneh Mousavi, Mirco Ravanelli et al.

Faithfulness measures whether chain-of-thought (CoT) representations accurately reflect a model's decision process and can be used as reliable explanations. Prior work has shown that CoTs from text-based LLMs are often unfaithful. This question has not been explored for large audio-language models (LALMs), where faithfulness is critical for safety-sensitive applications. Reasoning in LALMs is also more challenging, as models must first extract relevant clues from audio before reasoning over them. In this paper, we investigate the faithfulness of CoTs produced by several LALMs by applying targeted interventions, including paraphrasing, filler token injection, early answering, and introducing mistakes, on two challenging reasoning datasets: SAKURA and MMAR. After going through the aforementioned interventions across several datasets and tasks, our experiments suggest that, LALMs generally produce CoTs that appear to be faithful to their underlying decision processes.