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Agrima Seth

Publications and source records attributed to Agrima Seth.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

Are Aligned Large Language Models Still Misaligned?

Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) arises when model behavior diverges from human expectations and fails to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, which must co-occur in real-world settings to solve a real-world query. Existing misalignment benchmarks-such as INSECURE CODE (safety-centric), VALUEACTIONLENS (value-centric), and CULTURALHERITAGE (culture centric)-rely on evaluating misalignment along individual dimensions, preventing simultaneous evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce Mis-Align Bench, a unified benchmark for analyzing misalignment across safety, value, and cultural dimensions. First we constructs SAVACU, an English misaligned-aligned dataset of 382,424 samples spanning 112 domains (or labels), by reclassifying prompts from the LLM-PROMPT-DATASET via taxonomy into 14 safety domains, 56 value domains, and 42 cultural domains using Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, and expanding low-resource domains via Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with SimHash-based fingerprint to avoid deduplication. Furthermore, we pairs prompts with misaligned and aligned responses via two-stage rejection sampling to enforce quality. Second we benchmarks general-purpose, fine-tuned, and open-weight LLMs, enabling systematic evaluation of misalignment under three dimensions. Empirically, single-dimension models achieve high Coverage (upto 97.6%) but incur False Failure Rate >50% and lower Alignment Score (63%-66%) under joint conditions.

cs.CL

Bias Beyond Borders: Political Ideology Evaluation and Steering in Multilingual LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly shape global discourse, making fairness and ideological neutrality essential for responsible AI deployment. Despite growing attention to political bias in LLMs, prior work largely focuses on high-resource, Western languages or narrow multilingual settings, leaving cross-lingual consistency and safe post-hoc mitigation underexplored. To address this gap, we present a large-scale multilingual evaluation of political bias spanning 50 countries and 33 languages. We introduce a complementary post-hoc mitigation framework, Cross-Lingual Alignment Steering (CLAS), designed to augment existing steering methods by aligning ideological representations across languages and dynamically regulating intervention strength. This method aligns latent ideological representations induced by political prompts into a shared ideological subspace, ensuring cross lingual consistency, with the adaptive mechanism prevents over correction and preserves coherence. Experiments demonstrate substantial bias reduction along both economic and social axes with minimal degradation in response quality. The proposed framework establishes a scalable and interpretable paradigm for fairness-aware multilingual LLM governance, balancing ideological neutrality with linguistic and cultural diversity.

cs.CL

How Deep Is Representational Bias in LLMs? The Cases of Caste and Religion

Representational bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly been measured through single-response interactions and has focused on Global North-centric identities like race and gender. We expand on that research by conducting a systematic audit of GPT-4 Turbo to reveal how deeply encoded representational biases are and how they extend to less-explored dimensions of identity. We prompt GPT-4 Turbo to generate over 7,200 stories about significant life events (such as weddings) in India, using prompts designed to encourage diversity to varying extents. Comparing the diversity of religious and caste representation in the outputs against the actual population distribution in India as recorded in census data, we quantify the presence and "stickiness" of representational bias in the LLM for religion and caste. We find that GPT-4 responses consistently overrepresent culturally dominant groups far beyond their statistical representation, despite prompts intended to encourage representational diversity. Our findings also suggest that representational bias in LLMs has a winner-take-all quality that is more biased than the likely distribution bias in their training data, and repeated prompt-based nudges have limited and inconsistent efficacy in dislodging these biases. These results suggest that diversifying training data alone may not be sufficient to correct LLM bias, highlighting the need for more fundamental changes in model development. Dataset and Codebook: https://github.com/agrimaseth/How-Deep-Is-Representational-Bias-in-LLMs

cs.CL

KAHANI: Culturally-Nuanced Visual Storytelling Tool for Non-Western Cultures

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Text-To-Image (T2I) models have demonstrated the ability to generate compelling text and visual stories. However, their outputs are predominantly aligned with the sensibilities of the Global North, often resulting in an outsider's gaze on other cultures. As a result, non-Western communities have to put extra effort into generating culturally specific stories. To address this challenge, we developed a visual storytelling tool called Kahani that generates culturally grounded visual stories for non-Western cultures. Our tool leverages off-the-shelf models GPT-4 Turbo and Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL). By using Chain of Thought (CoT) and T2I prompting techniques, we capture the cultural context from user's prompt and generate vivid descriptions of the characters and scene compositions. To evaluate the effectiveness of Kahani, we conducted a comparative user study with ChatGPT-4 (with DALL-E3) in which participants from different regions of India compared the cultural relevance of stories generated by the two tools. The results of the qualitative and quantitative analysis performed in the user study show that Kahani's visual stories are more culturally nuanced than those generated by ChatGPT-4. In 27 out of 36 comparisons, Kahani outperformed or was on par with ChatGPT-4, effectively capturing cultural nuances and incorporating more Culturally Specific Items (CSI), validating its ability to generate culturally grounded visual stories.

cs.CL

Akal Badi ya Bias: An Exploratory Study of Gender Bias in Hindi Language Technology

Existing research in measuring and mitigating gender bias predominantly centers on English, overlooking the intricate challenges posed by non-English languages and the Global South. This paper presents the first comprehensive study delving into the nuanced landscape of gender bias in Hindi, the third most spoken language globally. Our study employs diverse mining techniques, computational models, field studies and sheds light on the limitations of current methodologies. Given the challenges faced with mining gender biased statements in Hindi using existing methods, we conducted field studies to bootstrap the collection of such sentences. Through field studies involving rural and low-income community women, we uncover diverse perceptions of gender bias, underscoring the necessity for context-specific approaches. This paper advocates for a community-centric research design, amplifying voices often marginalized in previous studies. Our findings not only contribute to the understanding of gender bias in Hindi but also establish a foundation for further exploration of Indic languages. By exploring the intricacies of this understudied context, we call for thoughtful engagement with gender bias, promoting inclusivity and equity in linguistic and cultural contexts beyond the Global North.

cs.CL

DOSA: A Dataset of Social Artifacts from Different Indian Geographical Subcultures

Generative models are increasingly being used in various applications, such as text generation, commonsense reasoning, and question-answering. To be effective globally, these models must be aware of and account for local socio-cultural contexts, making it necessary to have benchmarks to evaluate the models for their cultural familiarity. Since the training data for LLMs is web-based and the Web is limited in its representation of information, it does not capture knowledge present within communities that are not on the Web. Thus, these models exacerbate the inequities, semantic misalignment, and stereotypes from the Web. There has been a growing call for community-centered participatory research methods in NLP. In this work, we respond to this call by using participatory research methods to introduce $\textit{DOSA}$, the first community-generated $\textbf{D}$ataset $\textbf{o}$f 615 $\textbf{S}$ocial $\textbf{A}$rtifacts, by engaging with 260 participants from 19 different Indian geographic subcultures. We use a gamified framework that relies on collective sensemaking to collect the names and descriptions of these artifacts such that the descriptions semantically align with the shared sensibilities of the individuals from those cultures. Next, we benchmark four popular LLMs and find that they show significant variation across regional sub-cultures in their ability to infer the artifacts.

cs.CY

''Fifty Shades of Bias'': Normative Ratings of Gender Bias in GPT Generated English Text

Language serves as a powerful tool for the manifestation of societal belief systems. In doing so, it also perpetuates the prevalent biases in our society. Gender bias is one of the most pervasive biases in our society and is seen in online and offline discourses. With LLMs increasingly gaining human-like fluency in text generation, gaining a nuanced understanding of the biases these systems can generate is imperative. Prior work often treats gender bias as a binary classification task. However, acknowledging that bias must be perceived at a relative scale; we investigate the generation and consequent receptivity of manual annotators to bias of varying degrees. Specifically, we create the first dataset of GPT-generated English text with normative ratings of gender bias. Ratings were obtained using Best--Worst Scaling -- an efficient comparative annotation framework. Next, we systematically analyze the variation of themes of gender biases in the observed ranking and show that identity-attack is most closely related to gender bias. Finally, we show the performance of existing automated models trained on related concepts on our dataset.

cs.CL

Exploring Linguistic Style Matching in Online Communities: The Role of Social Context and Conversation Dynamics

Linguistic style matching (LSM) in conversations can be reflective of several aspects of social influence such as power or persuasion. However, how LSM relates to the outcomes of online communication on platforms such as Reddit is an unknown question. In this study, we analyze a large corpus of two-party conversation threads in Reddit where we identify all occurrences of LSM using two types of style: the use of function words and formality. Using this framework, we examine how levels of LSM differ in conversations depending on several social factors within Reddit: post and subreddit features, conversation depth, user tenure, and the controversiality of a comment. Finally, we measure the change of LSM following loss of status after community banning. Our findings reveal the interplay of LSM in Reddit conversations with several community metrics, suggesting the importance of understanding conversation engagement when understanding community dynamics.

cs.CL

Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationships

Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent of context, with only a few approaches considering community norms or prior conversation as context. Here, we introduce a new approach to identifying inappropriate communication by explicitly modeling the social relationship between the individuals. We introduce a new dataset of contextually-situated judgments of appropriateness and show that large language models can readily incorporate relationship information to accurately identify appropriateness in a given context. Using data from online conversations and movie dialogues, we provide insight into how the relationships themselves function as implicit norms and quantify the degree to which context-sensitivity is needed in different conversation settings. Further, we also demonstrate that contextual-appropriateness judgments are predictive of other social factors expressed in language such as condescension and politeness.

cs.CL

Cultural Differences in Friendship Network Behaviors: A Snapchat Case Study

Culture shapes people's behavior, both online and offline. Surprisingly, there is sparse research on how cultural context affects network formation and content consumption on social media. We analyzed the friendship networks and dyadic relations between content producers and consumers across 73 countries through a cultural lens in a closed-network setting. Closed networks allow for intimate bonds and self-expression, providing a natural setting to study cultural differences in behavior. We studied three theoretical frameworks of culture - individualism, relational mobility, and tightness. We found that friendship networks formed across different cultures differ in egocentricity, meaning the connectedness between a user's friends. Individualism, mobility, and looseness also significantly negatively impact how tie strength affects content consumption. Our findings show how culture affects social media behavior, and we outline how researchers can incorporate this in their work. Our work has implications for content recommendations and can improve content engagement.

cs.SI

COVID-19 Activity Risk Calculator as a Gamified Public Health Intervention Tool

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the virus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has impacted over 200 countries leading to hospitalizations and deaths of millions of people. Public health interventions, such as risk estimators, can reduce the spread of pandemics and epidemics through influencing behavior, which impacts risk of exposure and infection. Current publicly available COVID-19 risk estimation tools have had variable effectiveness during the pandemic due to their dependency on rapidly evolving factors such as community transmission levels and variants. There has also been confusion surrounding certain personal protective strategies such as risk reduction by mask-wearing and vaccination. In order to create a simple easy-to-use tool for estimating different individual risks associated with carrying out daily-life activity, we developed COVID-19 Activity Risk Calculator (CovARC). CovARC is a gamified public health intervention as users can "play with" how different risks associated with COVID-19 can change depending on several different factors when carrying out routine daily activities. Empowering the public to make informed, data-driven decisions about safely engaging in activities may help to reduce COVID-19 levels in the community. In this study, we demonstrate a streamlined, scalable and accurate COVID-19 risk calculation system. Our study also demonstrates the quantitative impact of vaccination and mask-wearing during periods of high case counts. Validation of this impact could inform and support policy decisions regarding case thresholds for mask mandates, and other public health interventions.

cs.CY

Closed Ranks: The Discursive Value of Military Support for Indian Politicians on Social Media

Influencers play a crucial role in shaping public narratives through information creation and diffusion in the Global South. While public figures from various walks of life and their impact on public discourse have been studied, defence veterans as influencers of the political discourse have been largely overlooked. Veterans matter in the public spehere as a normatively important political lobby. They are also interesting because, unlike active-duty military officers, they are not restricted from taking public sides on politics, so their posts may provide a window into the views of those still in the service. In this work, we systematically analyze the engagement on Twitter of self-described defence-related accounts and politician accounts that post on defence-related issues. We find that self-described defence-related accounts disproportionately engage with the current ruling party in India. We find that politicians promote their closeness to the defence services and nationalist credentials through engagements with defence-related influencers. We briefly consider the institutional implications of these patterns and connections

cs.SI

Detector monitoring with artificial neural networks at the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

Reliable data quality monitoring is a key asset in delivering collision data suitable for physics analysis in any modern large-scale High Energy Physics experiment. This paper focuses on the use of artificial neural networks for supervised and semi-supervised problems related to the identification of anomalies in the data collected by the CMS muon detectors. We use deep neural networks to analyze LHC collision data, represented as images organized geographically. We train a classifier capable of detecting the known anomalous behaviors with unprecedented efficiency and explore the usage of convolutional autoencoders to extend anomaly detection capabilities to unforeseen failure modes. A generalization of this strategy could pave the way to the automation of the data quality assessment process for present and future high-energy physics experiments.

physics.data-an

Comparative Study of Geometric and Image Based Modelling and Rendering Techniques

This is a comparative study of the traditional 3D computer graphics technique of geometric modelling and image-based rendering techniques that were surveyed and implemented.We have discussed the classifications and representative methods of both the techniques. The study has shown that there is a strong continuum between both the techniques and a hybrid of the two is most suitable for further implementations.This hybridisation study is underway to create models of real life situations and provide disaster management training.

cs.GR