Overview

With the ongoing rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems in high-stakes domains such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, hiring and human resources, education, societal infrastructure, and national security, it is crucial to develop and deploy the underlying AI models and systems in a responsible manner and ensure their trustworthiness, safety, and observability. Our focus is on large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI models and applications. Such models and applications need to be evaluated and monitored not only for accuracy and quality-related metrics but also for robustness against adversarial attacks, robustness under distribution shifts, bias and discrimination against underrepresented groups, security and privacy protection, interpretability, hallucinations (and other ungrounded or low-quality outputs), harmful content (such as sexual, racist, and hateful responses), jailbreaks of safety and alignment mechanisms, prompt injection attacks, misinformation and disinformation, fake, misleading, and manipulative content, copyright infringement, and other responsible AI dimensions.

In this tutorial, we first highlight key harms associated with generative AI systems with a focus on ungrounded answers (hallucinations), jailbreaks and prompt injection attacks, harmful content, and copyright infringement. We then discuss how to effectively address potential risks and challenges, following the framework of identification, measurement, mitigation (with four mitigation layers at model, safety system, application, and positioning), and operationalization. We present real-world LLM use cases, practical challenges, best practices, lessons learned from deploying solution approaches in industry, and key open problems. Our goal is to stimulate further research on grounding and evaluation of LLMs, and enable researchers and practitioners to build more robust and trustworthy LLM applications.

Tutorial Logistics

• ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD 2024)

  • 2 PM - 5 PM local time on Monday, August 26, 2024 in Room TBD [KDD Program Agenda]

KDD'24 Tutorial Slides (TBA)

Tutorial Video Recording: KDD'24 Video (TBA)

Grounding and Evaluation for LLMs Survey Paper

Tutorial Outline and Description

The tutorial will consist of the following parts:

Introduction and overview of the generative AI landscape

We give an overview of the generative AI landscape in industry and motivate the topic of the tutorial with the following questions. What constitutes generative AI? Why is generative AI an important topic? What are key applications of generative AI that are being deployed across different industry verticals? Why is it crucial to develop and deploy generative AI models and applications in a responsible manner?

Holistic Evaluation of LLMs

We highlight key challenges that arise when developing and deploying LLMs and other generative AI models in enterprise settings, and present an overview of solution approaches and open problems. We discuss evaluation dimensions such as truthfulness, safety and alignment, bias and fairness, robustness and security, privacy, model disgorgement and unlearning, copyright infringement, calibration and confidence, and transparency and causal interventions.

Grounding for LLMs

We then provide a deeper discussion of grounding for LLMs, that is, ensuring that every claim in the response generated by an LLM can be attributed to a document in the user-specified knowledge base. We highlight how grounding differs from factuality in the context of LLMs, and present technical solution approaches such as retrieval augmented generation, constrained decoding, evaluation, guardrails, and revision, and corpus tuning.

LLM Operations and Observability

We present processes and best practices for addressing grounding and evaluation related challenges in real-world LLM application settings. We discuss mechanisms for managing safety risks and vulnerabilities associated with deployed LLM and generative AI applications as well as practical approaches for monitoring the underlying models and systems with respect to quality and other responsible AI related metrics.

We will present real-world LLM case studies across different application domains such as healthcare, financial services, hiring, conversational assistants, and search and recommendation systems and discuss solution approaches for addressing above challenges, highlighting practical challenges, best practices, lessons learned from deploying solution approaches in the industry, and key open problems. We hope that our tutorial will inform both researchers and practitioners, stimulate further research on grounding and evaluation approaches for LLMs and other generative AI models, and pave the way for building more reliable generative AI models and applications in the future.

This tutorial is aimed at attendees with a wide range of interests and backgrounds both in academia and industry, including researchers interested in knowing about grounding, evaluation, and more broadly responsible AI techniques and tools in the context of LLMs / generative AI models as well as practitioners interested in implementing such tools for various LLMs / generative AI applications. We will not assume any prerequisite knowledge, and present the advances, challenges, and opportunities related to evaluation and grounding of LLMs by building intuition to ensure that the material is accessible to all attendees.