MBIAS: Mitigating Bias in Large Language Models While Retaining Context

In addressing the critical need for safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is crucial to ensure that the outputs are not only safe but also retain their contextual accuracy. Many existing LLMs are safe fine-tuned either with safety demonstrations, or rely only on adversarial testing. While able to get safe outputs, they often risk losing contextual meaning as they mitigate bias and toxicity. In response, we present MBIAS, a LLM framework instruction fine-tuned on a custom dataset specifically designed for safety interventions. MBIAS aims to address the significant issues of bias and toxicity in LLMs generations that typically manifest as underrepresentation or negative portrayals across various demographics, including inappropriate linguistic mentions and biased content in social media. We experiment on MBIAS for safety interventions using various configurations, and demonstrate more than a 30\% reduction in overall bias and toxicity while successfully retaining key information. Additionally, a demographic analysis on an out-of-distribution test set confirms the robustness of our approach, with reductions in bias and toxicity exceeding 90\% across various demographics. The dataset and instruction fine-tuned MBIAS are made available to the research community at https://huggingface.co/newsmediabias/MBIAS.

Closing the Perception-Action Loop for Semantically Safe Navigation in Semi-Static Environments

Autonomous robots navigating in changing environments demand adaptive navigation strategies for safe long-term operation. While many modern control paradigms offer theoretical guarantees, they often assume known extrinsic safety constraints, overlooking challenges when deployed in real-world environments where objects can appear, disappear, and shift over time. In this paper, we present a closed-loop perception-action pipeline that bridges this gap. Our system encodes an online-constructed dense map, along with object-level semantic and consistency estimates into a control barrier function (CBF) to regulate safe regions in the scene. A model predictive controller (MPC) leverages the CBF-based safety constraints to adapt its navigation behaviour, which is particularly crucial when potential scene changes occur. We test the system in simulations and real-world experiments to demonstrate the impact of semantic information and scene change handling on robot behavior, validating the practicality of our approach.

FakeWatch: A Framework for Detecting Fake News to Ensure Credible Elections

In today's technologically driven world, the rapid spread of fake news, particularly during critical events like elections, poses a growing threat to the integrity of information. To tackle this challenge head-on, we introduce FakeWatch, a comprehensive framework carefully designed to detect fake news. Leveraging a newly curated dataset of North American election-related news articles, we construct robust classification models. Our framework integrates a model hub comprising of both traditional machine learning (ML) techniques and cutting-edge Language Models (LMs) to discern fake news effectively. Our overarching objective is to provide the research community with adaptable and precise classification models adept at identifying the ever-evolving landscape of misinformation. Quantitative evaluations of fake news classifiers on our dataset reveal that, while state-of-the-art LMs exhibit a slight edge over traditional ML models, classical models remain competitive due to their balance of accuracy and computational efficiency. Additionally, qualitative analyses shed light on patterns within fake news articles. This research lays the groundwork for future endeavors aimed at combating misinformation, particularly concerning electoral processes. We provide our labeled data and model publicly for use and reproducibility.

FakeWatch ElectionShield: A Benchmarking Framework to Detect Fake News for Credible US Elections

In today's technologically driven world, the spread of fake news, particularly during crucial events such as elections, presents an increasing challenge to the integrity of information. To address this challenge, we introduce FakeWatch ElectionShield, an innovative framework carefully designed to detect fake news. We have created a novel dataset of North American election-related news articles through a blend of advanced language models (LMs) and thorough human verification, for precision and relevance. We propose a model hub of LMs for identifying fake news. Our goal is to provide the research community with adaptable and accurate classification models in recognizing the dynamic nature of misinformation. Extensive evaluation of fake news classifiers on our dataset and a benchmark dataset shows our that while state-of-the-art LMs slightly outperform the traditional ML models, classical models are still competitive with their balance of accuracy, explainability, and computational efficiency. This research sets the foundation for future studies to address misinformation related to elections.

Design-Inclusive Language Models for Responsible Information Access

As the use of large language models (LLMs) increases for everyday tasks, appropriate safeguards must be in place to ensure unbiased and safe output. Recent events highlight ethical concerns around conventionally trained LLMs, leading to overall unsafe user experiences. This motivates the need for responsible LLMs that are trained fairly, transparent to the public, and regularly monitored after deployment. In this work, we introduce the "Responsible Development of Language Models (ReDev)" framework to foster the development of fair, safe, and robust LLMs for all users. We also present a test suite of unique prompt types to assess LLMs on the aforementioned elements, ensuring all generated responses are non-harmful and free from biased content. Outputs from four state-of-the-art LLMs, OPT, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and LLaMA-2, are evaluated by our test suite, highlighting the importance of considering fairness, safety, and robustness at every stage of the machine learning pipeline, including data curation, training, and post-deployment.

Unlocking Bias Detection: Leveraging Transformer-Based Models for Content Analysis

Bias detection in text is imperative due to its role in reinforcing negative stereotypes, disseminating misinformation, and influencing decisions. Current language models often fall short in generalizing beyond their training sets. In response, we introduce the Contextualized Bi-Directional Dual Transformer (CBDT) Classifier. This novel architecture utilizes two synergistic transformer networks: the Context Transformer and the Entity Transformer, aiming for enhanced bias detection. Our dataset preparation follows the FAIR principles, ensuring ethical data usage. Through rigorous testing on various datasets, CBDT showcases its ability in distinguishing biased from neutral statements, while also pinpointing exact biased lexemes. Our approach outperforms existing methods, achieving a 2-4\% increase over benchmark performances. This opens avenues for adapting the CBDT model across diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes.

POV-SLAM: Probabilistic Object-Aware Variational SLAM in Semi-Static Environments

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in slowly varying scenes is important for long-term robot task completion. Failing to detect scene changes may lead to inaccurate maps and, ultimately, lost robots. Classical SLAM algorithms assume static scenes, and recent works take dynamics into account, but require scene changes to be observed in consecutive frames. Semi-static scenes, wherein objects appear, disappear, or move slowly over time, are often overlooked, yet are critical for long-term operation. We propose an object-aware, factor-graph SLAM framework that tracks and reconstructs semi-static object-level changes. Our novel variational expectation-maximization strategy is used to optimize factor graphs involving a Gaussian-Uniform bimodal measurement likelihood for potentially-changing objects. We evaluate our approach alongside the state-of-the-art SLAM solutions in simulation and on our novel real-world SLAM dataset captured in a warehouse over four months. Our method improves the robustness of localization in the presence of semi-static changes, providing object-level reasoning about the scene.

POCD: Probabilistic Object-Level Change Detection and Volumetric Mapping in Semi-Static Scenes

Maintaining an up-to-date map to reflect recent changes in the scene is very important, particularly in situations involving repeated traversals by a robot operating in an environment over an extended period. Undetected changes may cause a deterioration in map quality, leading to poor localization, inefficient operations, and lost robots. Volumetric methods, such as truncated signed distance functions (TSDFs), have quickly gained traction due to their real-time production of a dense and detailed map, though map updating in scenes that change over time remains a challenge. We propose a framework that introduces a novel probabilistic object state representation to track object pose changes in semi-static scenes. The representation jointly models a stationarity score and a TSDF change measure for each object. A Bayesian update rule that incorporates both geometric and semantic information is derived to achieve consistent online map maintenance. To extensively evaluate our approach alongside the state-of-the-art, we release a novel real-world dataset in a warehouse environment. We also evaluate on the public ToyCar dataset. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the reconstruction quality of semi-static environments.