Conference Award

ECU’s Srinivasan receives recognition for paper on AI tool

Dr. Madhusudan Srinivasan, an assistant professor in the East Carolina University Department of Computer Science, received recognition during a national conference on artificial intelligence.

His paper on GenFair, a fairness testing framework designed to uncover bias in large language models, received the best paper award during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Testing in Tucson, Arizona. The event was part of the Congress on Intelligent and Service-Oriented Systems Engineering. 

Srinivasan worked with Jubril Adegboyega Olajuwon, an ECU master’s student in data science, to produce the paper.

Srinivasan explained that large language models are used in a variety of applications, such as employee hiring, health care and legal advice. These models use massive amounts of text to understand and generate human language. However, they can miss complex and subtle biases that are often inherited from the data the models use, despite tools that are designed to prevent those biases, Srinivasan said.

He said GenFair automatically generates test cases that vary across sensitive attributes such as race, gender and age, and checks whether the model responds fairly across these variations. It applies metamorphic relations — rules that describe how model output should or should not change when input is slightly changed. As an example, changing input from “he” to “she” should not change the tone or meaning of text drastically.

The paper reveals that GenFair can identify subtle and complex fairness issues and found more fairness violations than other tools designed to prevent biases. It provides a scalable, automated way to test for fairness, which is crucial for building more ethical and equitable AI systems, Srinivasan said.

The paper’s complete title is “GenFair: Systematic Test Generation for Fairness Fault Detection in Large Language Models.”

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the world’s largest technical professional organization. Its goals are to help shape the systems and standards of tomorrow and advance technology for the benefit of humanity, according to its website.