GhostWriter: Augmenting Collaborative Human-AI Writing Experiences Through Personalization and Agency

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming more prevalent and have found a ubiquitous use in providing different forms of writing assistance. However, LLM-powered writing systems can frustrate users due to their limited personalization and control, which can be exacerbated when users lack experience with prompt engineering. We see design as one way to address these challenges and introduce GhostWriter, an AI-enhanced writing design probe where users can exercise enhanced agency and personalization. GhostWriter leverages LLMs to learn the user's intended writing style implicitly as they write, while allowing explicit teaching moments through manual style edits and annotations. We study 18 participants who use GhostWriter on two different writing tasks, observing that it helps users craft personalized text generations and empowers them by providing multiple ways to control the system's writing style. From this study, we present insights regarding people's relationship with AI-assisted writing and offer design recommendations for future work.

AttentionViz: A Global View of Transformer Attention

Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers that allows these models to learn rich, contextual relationships between elements of a sequence. The main idea behind our method is to visualize a joint embedding of the query and key vectors used by transformer models to compute attention. Unlike previous attention visualization techniques, our approach enables the analysis of global patterns across multiple input sequences. We create an interactive visualization tool, AttentionViz, based on these joint query-key embeddings, and use it to study attention mechanisms in both language and vision transformers. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in improving model understanding and offering new insights about query-key interactions through several application scenarios and expert feedback.

Envisioning the Next-Gen Document Reader

People read digital documents on a daily basis to share, exchange, and understand information in electronic settings. However, current document readers create a static, isolated reading experience, which does not support users' goals of gaining more knowledge and performing additional tasks through document interaction. In this work, we present our vision for the next-gen document reader that strives to enhance user understanding and create a more connected, trustworthy information experience. We describe 18 NLP-powered features to add to existing document readers and propose a novel plug-in marketplace that allows users to further customize their reading experience, as demonstrated through 3 exploratory UI prototypes available at https://github.com/catherinesyeh/nextgen-prototypes

Self-critiquing models for assisting human evaluators

We fine-tune large language models to write natural language critiques (natural language critical comments) using behavioral cloning. On a topic-based summarization task, critiques written by our models help humans find flaws in summaries that they would have otherwise missed. Our models help find naturally occurring flaws in both model and human written summaries, and intentional flaws in summaries written by humans to be deliberately misleading. We study scaling properties of critiquing with both topic-based summarization and synthetic tasks. Larger models write more helpful critiques, and on most tasks, are better at self-critiquing, despite having harder-to-critique outputs. Larger models can also integrate their own self-critiques as feedback, refining their own summaries into better ones. Finally, we motivate and introduce a framework for comparing critiquing ability to generation and discrimination ability. Our measurements suggest that even large models may still have relevant knowledge they cannot or do not articulate as critiques. These results are a proof of concept for using AI-assisted human feedback to scale the supervision of machine learning systems to tasks that are difficult for humans to evaluate directly. We release our training datasets, as well as samples from our critique assistance experiments.