We present counterfactual situation testing (CST), a causal data mining framework for detecting discrimination in classifiers. CST aims to answer in an actionable and meaningful way the intuitive question "what would have been the model outcome had the individual, or complainant, been of a different protected status?" It extends the legally-grounded situation testing of Thanh et al. (2011) by operationalizing the notion of fairness given the difference using counterfactual reasoning. For any complainant, we find and compare similar protected and non-protected instances in the dataset used by the classifier to construct a control and test group, where a difference between the decision outcomes of the two groups implies potential individual discrimination. Unlike situation testing, which builds both groups around the complainant, we build the test group on the complainant's counterfactual generated using causal knowledge. The counterfactual is intended to reflect how the protected attribute when changed affects the seemingly neutral attributes used by the classifier, which is taken for granted in many frameworks for discrimination. Under CST, we compare similar individuals within each group but dissimilar individuals across both groups due to the possible difference between the complainant and its counterfactual. Evaluating our framework on two classification scenarios, we show that it uncovers a greater number of cases than situation testing, even when the classifier satisfies the counterfactual fairness condition of Kusner et al. (2017).
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks have reported outstanding performance in tasks like community detection, molecule classification and link prediction. However, the black-box nature of these models prevents their application in domains like health and finance, where understanding the models' decisions is essential. Counterfactual Explanations (CE) provide these understandings through examples. Moreover, the literature on CE is flourishing with novel explanation methods which are tailored to graph learning. In this survey, we analyse the existing Graph Counterfactual Explanation methods, by providing the reader with an organisation of the literature according to a uniform formal notation for definitions, datasets, and metrics, thus, simplifying potential comparisons w.r.t to the method advantages and disadvantages. We discussed seven methods and sixteen synthetic and real datasets providing details on the possible generation strategies. We highlight the most common evaluation strategies and formalise nine of the metrics used in the literature. We first introduce the evaluation framework GRETEL and how it is possible to extend and use it while providing a further dimension of comparison encompassing reproducibility aspects. Finally, we provide a discussion on how counterfactual explanation interplays with privacy and fairness, before delving into open challenges and future works.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of everyday conversation and our lives. It is considered as the new electricity that is revolutionizing the world. AI is heavily invested in both industry and academy. However, there is also a lot of hype in the current AI debate. AI based on so-called deep learning has achieved impressive results in many problems, but its limits are already visible. AI has been under research since the 1940s, and the industry has seen many ups and downs due to over-expectations and related disappointments that have followed. The purpose of this book is to give a realistic picture of AI, its history, its potential and limitations. We believe that AI is a helper, not a ruler of humans. We begin by describing what AI is and how it has evolved over the decades. After fundamentals, we explain the importance of massive data for the current mainstream of artificial intelligence. The most common representations for AI, methods, and machine learning are covered. In addition, the main application areas are introduced. Computer vision has been central to the development of AI. The book provides a general introduction to computer vision, and includes an exposure to the results and applications of our own research. Emotions are central to human intelligence, but little use has been made in AI. We present the basics of emotional intelligence and our own research on the topic. We discuss super-intelligence that transcends human understanding, explaining why such achievement seems impossible on the basis of present knowledge,and how AI could be improved. Finally, a summary is made of the current state of AI and what to do in the future. In the appendix, we look at the development of AI education, especially from the perspective of contents at our own university.
In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.
Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
Recommender systems play a fundamental role in web applications in filtering massive information and matching user interests. While many efforts have been devoted to developing more effective models in various scenarios, the exploration on the explainability of recommender systems is running behind. Explanations could help improve user experience and discover system defects. In this paper, after formally introducing the elements that are related to model explainability, we propose a novel explainable recommendation model through improving the transparency of the representation learning process. Specifically, to overcome the representation entangling problem in traditional models, we revise traditional graph convolution to discriminate information from different layers. Also, each representation vector is factorized into several segments, where each segment relates to one semantic aspect in data. Different from previous work, in our model, factor discovery and representation learning are simultaneously conducted, and we are able to handle extra attribute information and knowledge. In this way, the proposed model can learn interpretable and meaningful representations for users and items. Unlike traditional methods that need to make a trade-off between explainability and effectiveness, the performance of our proposed explainable model is not negatively affected after considering explainability. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of our model as well as explanation faithfulness.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
To address the sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering, researchers usually make use of side information, such as social networks or item attributes, to improve recommendation performance. This paper considers the knowledge graph as the source of side information. To address the limitations of existing embedding-based and path-based methods for knowledge-graph-aware recommendation, we propose Ripple Network, an end-to-end framework that naturally incorporates the knowledge graph into recommender systems. Similar to actual ripples propagating on the surface of water, Ripple Network stimulates the propagation of user preferences over the set of knowledge entities by automatically and iteratively extending a user's potential interests along links in the knowledge graph. The multiple "ripples" activated by a user's historically clicked items are thus superposed to form the preference distribution of the user with respect to a candidate item, which could be used for predicting the final clicking probability. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Ripple Network achieves substantial gains in a variety of scenarios, including movie, book and news recommendation, over several state-of-the-art baselines.