arXiv subjects

Philip Resnik

Publications and source records attributed to Philip Resnik.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Sycophancy Undermines Epistemic Vigilance in Cooperative Vision-Language Tasks

To maintain common ground in cooperative conversation, humans iteratively update their beliefs as conversation participants share new information; participants who are epistemically vigilant detect when new information conflicts with prior beliefs and take steps to repair these conflicts. In order for AI systems to serve as reliable partners in complex cooperative tasks, they must similarly weigh incoming information against their own private evidence and shared context and appropriately surface inconsistencies when they arise. To measure the epistemic vigilance of vision-language models in cooperative settings, we present an information-asymmetric, dialog-based "spot-the-difference" task. Two models are privately shown one image each, and must determine through conversation whether the images are identical or, if not, identify the difference. Models routinely fail at this: they frequently overlook key evidence in their private image in favor of agreeing with their conversational partner, even when their agreement is unwarranted. We relate these violations of epistemic vigilance to the broader behavior of sycophancy, which manifests itself in cooperative goal-oriented dialog as over-accommodation and weak evidential grounding. Our results show that model steering to reduce sycophancy with a vector learned from task-agnostic sycophancy examples can reduce epistemic vigilance-related errors, making models more faithful reporters of their evidence, and in turn, more reliable partners in information-asymmetric cooperative tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Medical Triage as Pairwise Ranking: A Benchmark for Urgency in Patient Portal Messages

Medical triage is the task of allocating medical resources and prioritizing patients based on medical need. This paper introduces the first large-scale public dataset for studying medical triage in the context of asynchronous outpatient portal messages. Our novel task formulation views patient message triage as a pairwise inference problem, where we train LLMs to choose `"which message is more medically urgent" in a head-to-head tournament-style re-sort of a physician's inbox. Our novel benchmark PMR-Bench contains 1569 unique messages and 2,000+ high-quality test pairs for pairwise medical urgency assessment alongside a scalable training data generation pipeline. PMR-Bench includes samples that contain both unstructured patient-written messages alongside real electronic health record (EHR) data, emulating a real-world medical triage scenario. We develop a novel automated data annotation strategy to provide LLMs with in-domain guidance on this task. The resulting data is used to train two model classes, UrgentReward and UrgentSFT, leveraging Bradley-Terry and next token prediction objective, respectively to perform pairwise urgency classification. We find that UrgentSFT achieves top performance on PMR-Bench, with UrgentReward showing distinct advantages in low-resource settings. For example, UrgentSFT-8B and UrgentReward-8B provide a 15- and 16-point boost, respectively, on inbox sorting metrics over off-the-shelf 8B models. Paper resources can be found at https://tinyurl.com/Patient-Message-Triage

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Are Language Models Models?

Futrell and Mahowald claim LMs "serve as model systems", but an assessment at each of Marr's three levels suggests the claim is clearly not true at the implementation level, poorly motivated at the algorithmic-representational level, and problematic at the computational theory level. LMs are good candidates as tools; calling them cognitive models overstates the case and unnecessarily feeds LLM hype.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Speech-Based Prioritization for Schizophrenia Intervention

Millions of people suffer from mental health conditions, yet many remain undiagnosed or receive delayed care due to limited clinical resources and labor-intensive assessment methods. While most machine-assisted approaches focus on diagnostic classification, estimating symptom severity is essential for prioritizing care, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Speech-based AI provides a scalable alternative by enabling automated, continuous, and remote monitoring, reducing reliance on subjective self-reports and time-consuming evaluations. In this paper, we introduce a speech-based model for pairwise comparison of schizophrenia symptom severity, leveraging articulatory and acoustic features. These comparisons are used to generate severity rankings via the Bradley-Terry model. Our approach outperforms previous regression-based models on ranking-based metrics, offering a more effective solution for clinical triage and prioritization.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

ProxAnn: Use-Oriented Evaluations of Topic Models and Document Clustering

Topic model and document-clustering evaluations either use automated metrics that align poorly with human preferences or require expert labels that are intractable to scale. We design a scalable human evaluation protocol and a corresponding automated approximation that reflect practitioners' real-world usage of models. Annotators -- or an LLM-based proxy -- review text items assigned to a topic or cluster, infer a category for the group, then apply that category to other documents. Using this protocol, we collect extensive crowdworker annotations of outputs from a diverse set of topic models on two datasets. We then use these annotations to validate automated proxies, finding that the best LLM proxies are statistically indistinguishable from a human annotator and can therefore serve as a reasonable substitute in automated evaluations. Package, web interface, and data are at https://github.com/ahoho/proxann

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Multimodal Biomarkers for Schizophrenia: Towards Individual Symptom Severity Estimation

Studies on schizophrenia assessments using deep learning typically treat it as a classification task to detect the presence or absence of the disorder, oversimplifying the condition and reducing its clinical applicability. This traditional approach overlooks the complexity of schizophrenia, limiting its practical value in healthcare settings. This study shifts the focus to individual symptom severity estimation using a multimodal approach that integrates speech, video, and text inputs. We develop unimodal models for each modality and a multimodal framework to improve accuracy and robustness. By capturing a more detailed symptom profile, this approach can help in enhancing diagnostic precision and support personalized treatment, offering a scalable and objective tool for mental health assessment.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2025

Conversational User-AI Intervention: A Study on Prompt Rewriting for Improved LLM Response Generation

Human-LLM conversations are increasingly becoming more pervasive in peoples' professional and personal lives, yet many users still struggle to elicit helpful responses from LLM Chatbots. One of the reasons for this issue is users' lack of understanding in crafting effective prompts that accurately convey their information needs. Meanwhile, the existence of real-world conversational datasets on the one hand, and the text understanding faculties of LLMs on the other, present a unique opportunity to study this problem, and its potential solutions at scale. Thus, in this paper we present the first LLM-centric study of real human-AI chatbot conversations, focused on investigating aspects in which user queries fall short of expressing information needs, and the potential of using LLMs to rewrite suboptimal user prompts. Our findings demonstrate that rephrasing ineffective prompts can elicit better responses from a conversational system, while preserving the user's original intent. Notably, the performance of rewrites improves in longer conversations, where contextual inferences about user needs can be made more accurately. Additionally, we observe that LLMs often need to -- and inherently do -- make \emph{plausible} assumptions about a user's intentions and goals when interpreting prompts. Our findings largely hold true across conversational domains, user intents, and LLMs of varying sizes and families, indicating the promise of using prompt rewriting as a solution for better human-AI interactions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Understanding Common Ground Misalignment in Goal-Oriented Dialog: A Case-Study with Ubuntu Chat Logs

While it is commonly accepted that maintaining common ground plays a role in conversational success, little prior research exists connecting conversational grounding to success in task-oriented conversations. We study failures of grounding in the Ubuntu IRC dataset, where participants use text-only communication to resolve technical issues. We find that disruptions in conversational flow often stem from a misalignment in common ground, driven by a divergence in beliefs and assumptions held by participants. These disruptions, which we call conversational friction, significantly correlate with task success. We find that although LLMs can identify overt cases of conversational friction, they struggle with subtler and more context-dependent instances requiring pragmatic or domain-specific reasoning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Large Language Models are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models

This position paper's primary goal is to provoke thoughtful discussion about the relationship between bias and fundamental properties of large language models. I do this by seeking to convince the reader that harmful biases are an inevitable consequence arising from the design of any large language model as LLMs are currently formulated. To the extent that this is true, it suggests that the problem of harmful bias cannot be properly addressed without a serious reconsideration of AI driven by LLMs, going back to the foundational assumptions underlying their design.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A Multimodal Framework for the Assessment of the Schizophrenia Spectrum

This paper presents a novel multimodal framework to distinguish between different symptom classes of subjects in the schizophrenia spectrum and healthy controls using audio, video, and text modalities. We implemented Convolution Neural Network and Long Short Term Memory based unimodal models and experimented on various multimodal fusion approaches to come up with the proposed framework. We utilized a minimal Gated multimodal unit (mGMU) to obtain a bi-modal intermediate fusion of the features extracted from the input modalities before finally fusing the outputs of the bimodal fusions to perform subject-wise classifications. The use of mGMU units in the multimodal framework improved the performance in both weighted f1-score and weighted AUC-ROC scores.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2024

The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) systems are increasingly being deployed across diverse industries and research domains. Developers and end-users interact with these systems through the use of prompting and prompt engineering. Although prompt engineering is a widely adopted and extensively researched area, it suffers from conflicting terminology and a fragmented ontological understanding of what constitutes an effective prompt due to its relatively recent emergence. We establish a structured understanding of prompt engineering by assembling a taxonomy of prompting techniques and analyzing their applications. We present a detailed vocabulary of 33 vocabulary terms, a taxonomy of 58 LLM prompting techniques, and 40 techniques for other modalities. Additionally, we provide best practices and guidelines for prompt engineering, including advice for prompting state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs such as ChatGPT. We further present a meta-analysis of the entire literature on natural language prefix-prompting. As a culmination of these efforts, this paper presents the most comprehensive survey on prompt engineering to date.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

TopicGPT: A Prompt-based Topic Modeling Framework

Topic modeling is a well-established technique for exploring text corpora. Conventional topic models (e.g., LDA) represent topics as bags of words that often require "reading the tea leaves" to interpret; additionally, they offer users minimal control over the formatting and specificity of resulting topics. To tackle these issues, we introduce TopicGPT, a prompt-based framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to uncover latent topics in a text collection. TopicGPT produces topics that align better with human categorizations compared to competing methods: it achieves a harmonic mean purity of 0.74 against human-annotated Wikipedia topics compared to 0.64 for the strongest baseline. Its topics are also interpretable, dispensing with ambiguous bags of words in favor of topics with natural language labels and associated free-form descriptions. Moreover, the framework is highly adaptable, allowing users to specify constraints and modify topics without the need for model retraining. By streamlining access to high-quality and interpretable topics, TopicGPT represents a compelling, human-centered approach to topic modeling.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Words, Subwords, and Morphemes: What Really Matters in the Surprisal-Reading Time Relationship?

An important assumption that comes with using LLMs on psycholinguistic data has gone unverified. LLM-based predictions are based on subword tokenization, not decomposition of words into morphemes. Does that matter? We carefully test this by comparing surprisal estimates using orthographic, morphological, and BPE tokenization against reading time data. Our results replicate previous findings and provide evidence that in the aggregate, predictions using BPE tokenization do not suffer relative to morphological and orthographic segmentation. However, a finer-grained analysis points to potential issues with relying on BPE-based tokenization, as well as providing promising results involving morphologically-aware surprisal estimates and suggesting a new method for evaluating morphological prediction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

A multi-modal approach for identifying schizophrenia using cross-modal attention

This study focuses on how different modalities of human communication can be used to distinguish between healthy controls and subjects with schizophrenia who exhibit strong positive symptoms. We developed a multi-modal schizophrenia classification system using audio, video, and text. Facial action units and vocal tract variables were extracted as low-level features from video and audio respectively, which were then used to compute high-level coordination features that served as the inputs to the audio and video modalities. Context-independent text embeddings extracted from transcriptions of speech were used as the input for the text modality. The multi-modal system is developed by fusing a segment-to-session-level classifier for video and audio modalities with a text model based on a Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN) with cross-modal attention. The proposed multi-modal system outperforms the previous state-of-the-art multi-modal system by 8.53% in the weighted average F1 score.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Using co-sharing to identify use of mainstream news for promoting potentially misleading narratives

Much of the research quantifying volume and spread of online misinformation measures the construct at the source level, identifying a set of specific unreliable domains that account for a relatively small share of news consumption. This source-level dichotomy obscures the potential for users to repurpose factually true information from reliable sources to advance misleading narratives. We demonstrate this potentially far more prevalent form of misinformation by identifying articles from reliable sources that are frequently co-shared with (shared by users who also shared) "fake" news on social media, and concurrently extracting narratives present in fake news content and claims fact-checked as false. Specifically in this study, we use Twitter/X data from May 2018 to November 2021 matched to a U.S. voter file. We find that narratives present in misinformation content are significantly more likely to occur in co-shared articles than in articles from the same reliable sources that are not co-shared, consistent with users using information from mainstream sources to enhance the credibility and reach of potentially misleading claims.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

Natural Language Decompositions of Implicit Content Enable Better Text Representations

When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into account. We use a large language model to produce sets of propositions that are inferentially related to the text that has been observed, then validate the plausibility of the generated content via human judgments. Incorporating these explicit representations of implicit content proves useful in multiple problem settings that involve the human interpretation of utterances: assessing the similarity of arguments, making sense of a body of opinion data, and modeling legislative behavior. Our results suggest that modeling the meanings behind observed language, rather than the literal text alone, is a valuable direction for NLP and particularly its applications to social science.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Using Open-Ended Stressor Responses to Predict Depressive Symptoms across Demographics

Stressors are related to depression, but this relationship is complex. We investigate the relationship between open-ended text responses about stressors and depressive symptoms across gender and racial/ethnic groups. First, we use topic models and other NLP tools to find thematic and vocabulary differences when reporting stressors across demographic groups. We train language models using self-reported stressors to predict depressive symptoms, finding a relationship between stressors and depression. Finally, we find that differences in stressors translate to downstream performance differences across demographic groups.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Are Neural Topic Models Broken?

Recently, the relationship between automated and human evaluation of topic models has been called into question. Method developers have staked the efficacy of new topic model variants on automated measures, and their failure to approximate human preferences places these models on uncertain ground. Moreover, existing evaluation paradigms are often divorced from real-world use. Motivated by content analysis as a dominant real-world use case for topic modeling, we analyze two related aspects of topic models that affect their effectiveness and trustworthiness in practice for that purpose: the stability of their estimates and the extent to which the model's discovered categories align with human-determined categories in the data. We find that neural topic models fare worse in both respects compared to an established classical method. We take a step toward addressing both issues in tandem by demonstrating that a straightforward ensembling method can reliably outperform the members of the ensemble.

cs.CL↗