PersonaTeaming: Exploring How Introducing Personas Can Improve Automated AI Red-Teaming

Recent developments in AI governance and safety research have called for red-teaming methods that can effectively surface potential risks posed by AI models. Many of these calls have emphasized how the identities and backgrounds of red-teamers can shape their red-teaming strategies, and thus the kinds of risks they are likely to uncover. While automated red-teaming approaches promise to complement human red-teaming by enabling larger-scale exploration of model behavior, current approaches do not consider the role of identity. As an initial step towards incorporating people's background and identities in automated red-teaming, we develop and evaluate a novel method, PersonaTeaming, that introduces personas in the adversarial prompt generation process to explore a wider spectrum of adversarial strategies. In particular, we first introduce a methodology for mutating prompts based on either "red-teaming expert" personas or "regular AI user" personas. We then develop a dynamic persona-generating algorithm that automatically generates various persona types adaptive to different seed prompts. In addition, we develop a set of new metrics to explicitly measure the "mutation distance" to complement existing diversity measurements of adversarial prompts. Our experiments show promising improvements (up to 144.1%) in the attack success rates of adversarial prompts through persona mutation, while maintaining prompt diversity, compared to RainbowPlus, a state-of-the-art automated red-teaming method. We discuss the strengths and limitations of different persona types and mutation methods, shedding light on future opportunities to explore complementarities between automated and human red-teaming approaches.

Cognitive Chain-of-Thought: Structured Multimodal Reasoning about Social Situations

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps models think step by step. But what happens when they must see, understand, and judge-all at once? In visual tasks grounded in social context, where bridging perception with norm-grounded judgments is essential, flat CoT often breaks down. We introduce Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a prompting strategy that scaffolds VLM reasoning through three cognitively inspired stages: perception, situation, and norm. Our experiments show that, across multiple multimodal benchmarks (including intent disambiguation, commonsense reasoning, and safety), CoCoT consistently outperforms CoT and direct prompting (+8\% on average). Our findings demonstrate that cognitively grounded reasoning stages enhance interpretability and social awareness in VLMs, paving the way for safer and more reliable multimodal systems.

Investigating Practices and Opportunities for Cross-functional Collaboration around AI Fairness in Industry Practice

An emerging body of research indicates that ineffective cross-functional collaboration -- the interdisciplinary work done by industry practitioners across roles -- represents a major barrier to addressing issues of fairness in AI design and development. In this research, we sought to better understand practitioners' current practices and tactics to enact cross-functional collaboration for AI fairness, in order to identify opportunities to support more effective collaboration. We conducted a series of interviews and design workshops with 23 industry practitioners spanning various roles from 17 companies. We found that practitioners engaged in bridging work to overcome frictions in understanding, contextualization, and evaluation around AI fairness across roles. In addition, in organizational contexts with a lack of resources and incentives for fairness work, practitioners often piggybacked on existing requirements (e.g., for privacy assessments) and AI development norms (e.g., the use of quantitative evaluation metrics), although they worry that these tactics may be fundamentally compromised. Finally, we draw attention to the invisible labor that practitioners take on as part of this bridging and piggybacking work to enact interdisciplinary collaboration for fairness. We close by discussing opportunities for both FAccT researchers and AI practitioners to better support cross-functional collaboration for fairness in the design and development of AI systems.

Understanding Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for User-Driven Algorithm Auditing in Industry Practice

Recent years have seen growing interest among both researchers and practitioners in user-driven approaches to algorithm auditing, which directly engage users in detecting problematic behaviors in algorithmic systems. However, we know little about industry practitioners' current practices and challenges around user-driven auditing, nor what opportunities exist for them to better leverage such approaches in practice. To investigate, we conducted a series of interviews and iterative co-design activities with practitioners who employ user-driven auditing approaches in their work. Our findings reveal several challenges practitioners face in appropriately recruiting and incentivizing user auditors, scaffolding user audits, and deriving actionable insights from user-driven audit reports. Furthermore, practitioners shared organizational obstacles to user-driven auditing, surfacing a complex relationship between practitioners and user auditors. Based on these findings, we discuss opportunities for future HCI research to help realize the potential (and mitigate risks) of user-driven auditing in industry practice.

Exploring How Machine Learning Practitioners (Try To) Use Fairness Toolkits

Recent years have seen the development of many open-source ML fairness toolkits aimed at helping ML practitioners assess and address unfairness in their systems. However, there has been little research investigating how ML practitioners actually use these toolkits in practice. In this paper, we conducted the first in-depth empirical exploration of how industry practitioners (try to) work with existing fairness toolkits. In particular, we conducted think-aloud interviews to understand how participants learn about and use fairness toolkits, and explored the generality of our findings through an anonymous online survey. We identified several opportunities for fairness toolkits to better address practitioner needs and scaffold them in using toolkits effectively and responsibly. Based on these findings, we highlight implications for the design of future open-source fairness toolkits that can support practitioners in better contextualizing, communicating, and collaborating around ML fairness efforts.

Beyond General Purpose Machine Translation: The Need for Context-specific Empirical Research to Design for Appropriate User Trust

Machine Translation (MT) has the potential to help people overcome language barriers and is widely used in high-stakes scenarios, such as in hospitals. However, in order to use MT reliably and safely, users need to understand when to trust MT outputs and how to assess the quality of often imperfect translation results. In this paper, we discuss research directions to support users to calibrate trust in MT systems. We share findings from an empirical study in which we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 clinicians to understand how they communicate with patients across language barriers, and if and how they use MT systems. Based on our findings, we advocate for empirical research on how MT systems are used in practice as an important first step to addressing the challenges in building appropriate trust between users and MT tools.