Critical decisions like hiring, college admissions, and loan approvals are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors vary systematically: Groups with higher average outcomes are typically assigned higher false positive rates, while those with lower average outcomes are assigned higher false negative rates. We characterize the conditions that give rise to this disparate impact and explain why the intuitive remedy to omit demographic variables from datasets does not correct it. Instead of data omission, this paper examines how data enrichment can broaden access to opportunity. The strategy, which we call "Affirmative Information," could stand as an alternative to Affirmative Action.
相關內容
Secure multi-party computation has seen substantial performance improvements in recent years and is being increasingly used in commercial products. While a significant amount of work was dedicated to improving its efficiency under standard security models, the threat models do not account for information leakage from the output of secure function evaluation. Quantifying information disclosure about private inputs from observing the function outcome is the subject of this work. Motivated by the City of Boston gender pay gap studies, in this work we focus on the computation of the average of salaries and quantify information disclosure about private inputs of one or more participants (the target) to an adversary via information-theoretic techniques. We study a number of distributions including log-normal, which is typically used for modeling salaries. We consequently evaluate information disclosure after repeated evaluation of the average function on overlapping inputs, as was done in the Boston gender pay study that ran multiple times, and provide recommendations for using the sum and average functions in secure computation applications. Our goal is to develop mechanisms that lower information disclosure about participants' inputs to a desired level and provide guidelines for setting up real-world secure evaluation of this function.
Recent research has begun to examine the potential of automatically finding and fixing accessibility issues that manifest in software. However, while recent work makes important progress, it has generally been skewed toward identifying issues that affect users with certain disabilities, such as those with visual or hearing impairments. However, there are other groups of users with different types of disabilities that also need software tooling support to improve their experience. As such, this paper aims to automatically identify accessibility issues that affect users with motor-impairments. To move toward this goal, this paper introduces a novel approach, called MotorEase, capable of identifying accessibility issues in mobile app UIs that impact motor-impaired users. Motor-impaired users often have limited ability to interact with touch-based devices, and instead may make use of a switch or other assistive mechanism -- hence UIs must be designed to support both limited touch gestures and the use of assistive devices. MotorEase adapts computer vision and text processing techniques to enable a semantic understanding of app UI screens, enabling the detection of violations related to four popular, previously unexplored UI design guidelines that support motor-impaired users, including: (i) visual touch target size, (ii) expanding sections, (iii) persisting elements, and (iv) adjacent icon visual distance. We evaluate MotorEase on a newly derived benchmark, called MotorCheck, that contains 555 manually annotated examples of violations to the above accessibility guidelines, across 1599 screens collected from 70 applications via a mobile app testing tool. Our experiments illustrate that MotorEase is able to identify violations with an average accuracy of ~90%, and a false positive rate of less than 9%, outperforming baseline techniques.
Detectives frequently engage in information detection and reasoning simultaneously when making decisions across various cases, especially when confronted with a vast amount of information. With the rapid development of large language models~(LLMs), evaluating how these models identify key information and reason to solve questions becomes increasingly relevant. We introduces the DetectBench, a reading comprehension dataset designed to assess a model's ability to jointly ability in key information detection and multi-hop reasoning when facing complex and implicit information. The DetectBench comprises 3,928 questions, each paired with a paragraph averaging 190 tokens in length. To enhance model's detective skills, we propose the Detective Thinking Framework. These methods encourage models to identify all possible clues within the context before reasoning. Our experiments reveal that existing models perform poorly in both information detection and multi-hop reasoning. However, the Detective Thinking Framework approach alleviates this issue.
It has been observed that representations learned by distinct neural networks conceal structural similarities when the models are trained under similar inductive biases. From a geometric perspective, identifying the classes of transformations and the related invariances that connect these representations is fundamental to unlocking applications, such as merging, stitching, and reusing different neural modules. However, estimating task-specific transformations a priori can be challenging and expensive due to several factors (e.g., weights initialization, training hyperparameters, or data modality). To this end, we introduce a versatile method to directly incorporate a set of invariances into the representations, constructing a product space of invariant components on top of the latent representations without requiring prior knowledge about the optimal invariance to infuse. We validate our solution on classification and reconstruction tasks, observing consistent latent similarity and downstream performance improvements in a zero-shot stitching setting. The experimental analysis comprises three modalities (vision, text, and graphs), twelve pretrained foundational models, nine benchmarks, and several architectures trained from scratch.
A community needs assessment is a tool used by non-profits and government agencies to quantify the strengths and issues of a community, allowing them to allocate their resources better. Such approaches are transitioning towards leveraging social media conversations to analyze the needs of communities and the assets already present within them. However, manual analysis of exponentially increasing social media conversations is challenging. There is a gap in the present literature in computationally analyzing how community members discuss the strengths and needs of the community. To address this gap, we introduce the task of identifying, extracting, and categorizing community needs and assets from conversational data using sophisticated natural language processing methods. To facilitate this task, we introduce the first dataset about community needs and assets consisting of 3,511 conversations from Reddit, annotated using crowdsourced workers. Using this dataset, we evaluate an utterance-level classification model compared to sentiment classification and a popular large language model (in a zero-shot setting), where we find that our model outperforms both baselines at an F1 score of 94% compared to 49% and 61% respectively. Furthermore, we observe through our study that conversations about needs have negative sentiments and emotions, while conversations about assets focus on location and entities. The dataset is available at //github.com/towhidabsar/CommunityNeeds.
Difficulties in replication and reproducibility of empirical evidences in machine learning research have become a prominent topic in recent years. Ensuring that machine learning research results are sound and reliable requires reproducibility, which verifies the reliability of research findings using the same code and data. This promotes open and accessible research, robust experimental workflows, and the rapid integration of new findings. Evaluating the degree to which research publications support these different aspects of reproducibility is one goal of the present work. For this we introduce an ontology of reproducibility in machine learning and apply it to methods for graph neural networks. Building on these efforts we turn towards another critical challenge in machine learning, namely the curse of dimensionality, which poses challenges in data collection, representation, and analysis, making it harder to find representative data and impeding the training and inference processes. Using the closely linked concept of geometric intrinsic dimension we investigate to which extend the used machine learning models are influenced by the intrinsic dimension of the data sets they are trained on.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
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.
Small data challenges have emerged in many learning problems, since the success of deep neural networks often relies on the availability of a huge amount of labeled data that is expensive to collect. To address it, many efforts have been made on training complex models with small data in an unsupervised and semi-supervised fashion. In this paper, we will review the recent progresses on these two major categories of methods. A wide spectrum of small data models will be categorized in a big picture, where we will show how they interplay with each other to motivate explorations of new ideas. We will review the criteria of learning the transformation equivariant, disentangled, self-supervised and semi-supervised representations, which underpin the foundations of recent developments. Many instantiations of unsupervised and semi-supervised generative models have been developed on the basis of these criteria, greatly expanding the territory of existing autoencoders, generative adversarial nets (GANs) and other deep networks by exploring the distribution of unlabeled data for more powerful representations. While we focus on the unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we will also provide a broader review of other emerging topics, from unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation to the fundamental roles of transformation equivariance and invariance in training a wide spectrum of deep networks. It is impossible for us to write an exclusive encyclopedia to include all related works. Instead, we aim at exploring the main ideas, principles and methods in this area to reveal where we are heading on the journey towards addressing the small data challenges in this big data era.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191