In credence goods markets such as health care or repair services, consumers rely on experts with superior information to adequately diagnose and treat them. Experts, however, are constrained in their diagnostic abilities, which hurts market efficiency and consumer welfare. Technological breakthroughs that substitute or complement expert judgments have the potential to alleviate consumer mistreatment. This article studies how competitive experts adopt novel diagnostic technologies when skills are heterogeneously distributed and obfuscated to consumers. We differentiate between novel technologies that increase expert abilities, and algorithmic decision aids that complement expert judgments, but do not affect an expert's personal diagnostic precision. We show that high-ability experts may be incentivized to forego the decision aid in order to escape a pooling equilibrium by differentiating themselves from low-ability experts. Results from an online experiment support our hypothesis, showing that high-ability experts are significantly less likely than low-ability experts to invest into an algorithmic decision aid. Furthermore, we document pervasive under-investments, and no effect on expert honesty.
Spatiotemporal datasets, which consist of spatially-referenced time series, are ubiquitous in many scientific and business-intelligence applications, such as air pollution monitoring, disease tracking, and cloud-demand forecasting. As modern datasets continue to increase in size and complexity, there is a growing need for new statistical methods that are flexible enough to capture complex spatiotemporal dynamics and scalable enough to handle large prediction problems. This work presents the Bayesian Neural Field (BayesNF), a domain-general statistical model for inferring rich probability distributions over a spatiotemporal domain, which can be used for data-analysis tasks including forecasting, interpolation, and variography. BayesNF integrates a novel deep neural network architecture for high-capacity function estimation with hierarchical Bayesian inference for robust uncertainty quantification. By defining the prior through a sequence of smooth differentiable transforms, posterior inference is conducted on large-scale data using variationally learned surrogates trained via stochastic gradient descent. We evaluate BayesNF against prominent statistical and machine-learning baselines, showing considerable improvements on diverse prediction problems from climate and public health datasets that contain tens to hundreds of thousands of measurements. The paper is accompanied with an open-source software package (//github.com/google/bayesnf) that is easy-to-use and compatible with modern GPU and TPU accelerators on the JAX machine learning platform.
Transformers achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness across many tasks, but an understanding of the inductive biases that they have and how those biases are different from other neural network architectures remains elusive. Various neural network architectures such as fully connected networks have been found to have a simplicity bias towards simple functions of the data; one version of this simplicity bias is a spectral bias to learn simple functions in the Fourier space. In this work, we identify the notion of sensitivity of the model to random changes in the input as a notion of simplicity bias which provides a unified metric to explain the simplicity and spectral bias of transformers across different data modalities. We show that transformers have lower sensitivity than alternative architectures, such as LSTMs, MLPs and CNNs, across both vision and language tasks. We also show that low-sensitivity bias correlates with improved robustness; furthermore, it can also be used as an efficient intervention to further improve the robustness of transformers.
We consider the problem of average consensus in a distributed system comprising a set of nodes that can exchange information among themselves. We focus on a class of algorithms for solving such a problem whereby each node maintains a state and updates it iteratively as a linear combination of the states maintained by its in-neighbors, i.e., nodes from which it receives information directly. Averaging algorithms within this class can be thought of as discrete-time linear time-varying systems without external driving inputs and whose state matrix is column stochastic. As a result, the algorithms exhibit a global invariance property in that the sum of the state variables remains constant at all times. In this paper, we report on another invariance property for the aforementioned class of averaging algorithms. This property is local to each node and reflects the conservation of certain quantities capturing an aggregate of all the values received by a node from its in-neighbors and all the values sent by said node to its out-neighbors (i.e., nodes to which it sends information directly) throughout the execution of the averaging algorithm. We show how this newly-discovered invariant can be leveraged for detecting errors while executing the averaging algorithm.
Advanced by rich perception and precise execution, robots possess immense potential to provide professional and customized rehabilitation exercises for patients with mobility impairments caused by strokes. Autonomous robotic rehabilitation significantly reduces human workloads in the long and tedious rehabilitation process. However, training a rehabilitation robot is challenging due to the data scarcity issue. This challenge arises from privacy concerns (e.g., the risk of leaking private disease and identity information of patients) during clinical data access and usage. Data from various patients and hospitals cannot be shared for adequate robot training, further compromising rehabilitation safety and limiting implementation scopes. To address this challenge, this work developed a novel federated joint learning (FJL) method to jointly train robots across hospitals. FJL also adopted a long short-term memory network (LSTM)-Transformer learning mechanism to effectively explore the complex tempo-spatial relations among patient mobility conditions and robotic rehabilitation motions. To validate FJL's effectiveness in training a robot network, a clinic-simulation combined experiment was designed. Real rehabilitation exercise data from 200 patients with stroke diseases (upper limb hemiplegia, Parkinson's syndrome, and back pain syndrome) were adopted. Inversely driven by clinical data, 300,000 robotic rehabilitation guidances were simulated. FJL proved to be effective in joint rehabilitation learning, performing 20% - 30% better than baseline methods.
The escalating integration of machine learning in high-stakes fields such as healthcare raises substantial concerns about model fairness. We propose an interpretable framework - Fairness-Aware Interpretable Modeling (FAIM), to improve model fairness without compromising performance, featuring an interactive interface to identify a "fairer" model from a set of high-performing models and promoting the integration of data-driven evidence and clinical expertise to enhance contextualized fairness. We demonstrated FAIM's value in reducing sex and race biases by predicting hospital admission with two real-world databases, MIMIC-IV-ED and SGH-ED. We show that for both datasets, FAIM models not only exhibited satisfactory discriminatory performance but also significantly mitigated biases as measured by well-established fairness metrics, outperforming commonly used bias-mitigation methods. Our approach demonstrates the feasibility of improving fairness without sacrificing performance and provides an a modeling mode that invites domain experts to engage, fostering a multidisciplinary effort toward tailored AI fairness.
The prevalence of 3D printing poses a significant risk to public safety, as any individual with internet access and a commodity printer is able to produce untraceable firearms, keys, counterfeit products, etc. To aid government authorities in combating these new security threats, several approaches have been taken to tag 3D-prints with identifying information. Known as fingerprints, this information is written into the object using various bit embedding techniques; examples include varying the height of the molten thermoplastic layers, and depositing metallic powder with different magnetic properties. Yet, the practicality of theses techniques in real-world forensic settings is hindered by the adversarial nature of this problem. That is, the 3D-printing process is out of reach of any law enforcement agencies; it is the adversary who controls all aspects of printing and possesses the printed object. To combat these threats, law enforcement agencies can regulate the manufacturing of 3D printers, on which they may enforce a fingerprinting scheme, and collect adversarially tampered remains (e.g., fragments of a broken 3D-printed firearm) during forensic investigation. Therefore, it is important to devise fingerprinting techniques so that the fingerprint could be extracted even if printing is carried out by the adversary. To this end, we present SIDE (Secure Information Embedding and Extraction), a fingerprinting framework that tackles the adversarial nature of forensic fingerprinting in 3D prints by offering both secure information embedding and secure information extraction.
Chat-based large language models have the opportunity to empower individuals lacking high-quality healthcare access to receive personalized information across a variety of topics. However, users may ask underspecified questions that require additional context for a model to correctly answer. We study how large language model biases are exhibited through these contextual questions in the healthcare domain. To accomplish this, we curate a dataset of sexual and reproductive healthcare questions that are dependent on age, sex, and location attributes. We compare models' outputs with and without demographic context to determine group alignment among our contextual questions. Our experiments reveal biases in each of these attributes, where young adult female users are favored.
Understanding causality helps to structure interventions to achieve specific goals and enables predictions under interventions. With the growing importance of learning causal relationships, causal discovery tasks have transitioned from using traditional methods to infer potential causal structures from observational data to the field of pattern recognition involved in deep learning. The rapid accumulation of massive data promotes the emergence of causal search methods with brilliant scalability. Existing summaries of causal discovery methods mainly focus on traditional methods based on constraints, scores and FCMs, there is a lack of perfect sorting and elaboration for deep learning-based methods, also lacking some considers and exploration of causal discovery methods from the perspective of variable paradigms. Therefore, we divide the possible causal discovery tasks into three types according to the variable paradigm and give the definitions of the three tasks respectively, define and instantiate the relevant datasets for each task and the final causal model constructed at the same time, then reviews the main existing causal discovery methods for different tasks. Finally, we propose some roadmaps from different perspectives for the current research gaps in the field of causal discovery and point out future research directions.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.