James Wexler


2024

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ConstitutionalExperts: Training a Mixture of Principle-based Prompts
Savvas Petridis | Ben Wedin | Ann Yuan | James Wexler | Nithum Thain
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable at a variety of tasks given the right prompt, but writing one is still a difficult and tedious process. In this work, we introduce ConstitutionalExperts, a method for learning a prompt consisting of constitutional principles (i.e. rules), given a training dataset. Unlike prior methods that optimize the prompt as a single entity, our method incrementally improves the prompt by surgically editing individual principles. We also show that we can improve overall performance by learning unique prompts for different semantic regions of the training data and using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to route inputs at inference time. We compare our method to other state of the art prompt-optimization techniques across six benchmark datasets. We also investigate whether MoE improves these other techniques. Our results suggest that ConstitutionalExperts outperforms other prompt optimization techniques by 10.9% (F1) and that mixture-of-experts improves all techniques, suggesting its broad applicability.

2020

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The Language Interpretability Tool: Extensible, Interactive Visualizations and Analysis for NLP Models
Ian Tenney | James Wexler | Jasmijn Bastings | Tolga Bolukbasi | Andy Coenen | Sebastian Gehrmann | Ellen Jiang | Mahima Pushkarna | Carey Radebaugh | Emily Reif | Ann Yuan
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present the Language Interpretability Tool (LIT), an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of NLP models. We focus on core questions about model behavior: Why did my model make this prediction? When does it perform poorly? What happens under a controlled change in the input? LIT integrates local explanations, aggregate analysis, and counterfactual generation into a streamlined, browser-based interface to enable rapid exploration and error analysis. We include case studies for a diverse set of workflows, including exploring counterfactuals for sentiment analysis, measuring gender bias in coreference systems, and exploring local behavior in text generation. LIT supports a wide range of models—including classification, seq2seq, and structured prediction—and is highly extensible through a declarative, framework-agnostic API. LIT is under active development, with code and full documentation available at https://github.com/pair-code/lit.