Machine learning systems produce biased results towards certain demographic groups, known as the fairness problem. Recent approaches to tackle this problem learn a latent code (i.e., representation) through disentangled representation learning and then discard the latent code dimensions correlated with sensitive attributes (e.g., gender). Nevertheless, these approaches may suffer from incomplete disentanglement and overlook proxy attributes (proxies for sensitive attributes) when processing real-world data, especially for unstructured data, causing performance degradation in fairness and loss of useful information for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel fairness framework that performs debiasing with regard to both sensitive attributes and proxy attributes, which boosts the prediction performance of downstream task models without complete disentanglement. The main idea is to, first, leverage gradient-based explanation to find two model focuses, 1) one focus for predicting sensitive attributes and 2) the other focus for predicting downstream task labels, and second, use them to perturb the latent code that guides the training of downstream task models towards fairness and utility goals. We show empirically that our framework works with both disentangled and non-disentangled representation learning methods and achieves better fairness-accuracy trade-off on unstructured and structured datasets than previous state-of-the-art approaches.
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Batch active learning is a popular approach for efficiently training machine learning models on large, initially unlabelled datasets by repeatedly acquiring labels for batches of data points. However, many recent batch active learning methods are white-box approaches and are often limited to differentiable parametric models: they score unlabeled points using acquisition functions based on model embeddings or first- and second-order derivatives. In this paper, we propose black-box batch active learning for regression tasks as an extension of white-box approaches. Crucially, our method only relies on model predictions. This approach is compatible with a wide range of machine learning models, including regular and Bayesian deep learning models and non-differentiable models such as random forests. It is rooted in Bayesian principles and utilizes recent kernel-based approaches. This allows us to extend a wide range of existing state-of-the-art white-box batch active learning methods (BADGE, BAIT, LCMD) to black-box models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experimental evaluations on regression datasets, achieving surprisingly strong performance compared to white-box approaches for deep learning models.
Deep learning is also known as hierarchical learning, where the learner _learns_ to represent a complicated target function by decomposing it into a sequence of simpler functions to reduce sample and time complexity. This paper formally analyzes how multi-layer neural networks can perform such hierarchical learning _efficiently_ and _automatically_ by SGD on the training objective. On the conceptual side, we present a theoretical characterizations of how certain types of deep (i.e. super-constant layer) neural networks can still be sample and time efficiently trained on some hierarchical tasks, when no existing algorithm (including layerwise training, kernel method, etc) is known to be efficient. We establish a new principle called "backward feature correction", where the errors in the lower-level features can be automatically corrected when training together with the higher-level layers. We believe this is a key behind how deep learning is performing deep (hierarchical) learning, as opposed to layerwise learning or simulating some non-hierarchical method. On the technical side, we show for every input dimension $d > 0$, there is a concept class of degree $\omega(1)$ multi-variate polynomials so that, using $\omega(1)$-layer neural networks as learners, SGD can learn any function from this class in $\mathsf{poly}(d)$ time to any $\frac{1}{\mathsf{poly}(d)}$ error, through learning to represent it as a composition of $\omega(1)$ layers of quadratic functions using "backward feature correction." In contrast, we do not know any other simpler algorithm (including layerwise training, applying kernel method sequentially, training a two-layer network, etc) that can learn this concept class in $\mathsf{poly}(d)$ time even to any $d^{-0.01}$ error. As a side result, we prove $d^{\omega(1)}$ lower bounds for several non-hierarchical learners, including any kernel methods.
Real-life tools for decision-making in many critical domains are based on ranking results. With the increasing awareness of algorithmic fairness, recent works have presented measures for fairness in ranking. Many of those definitions consider the representation of different ``protected groups'', in the top-$k$ ranked items, for any reasonable $k$. Given the protected groups, confirming algorithmic fairness is a simple task. However, the groups' definitions may be unknown in advance. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting groups with biased representation in the top-$k$ ranked items, eliminating the need to pre-define protected groups. The number of such groups possible can be exponential, making the problem hard. We propose efficient search algorithms for two different fairness measures: global representation bounds, and proportional representation. Then we propose a method to explain the bias in the representations of groups utilizing the notion of Shapley values. We conclude with an experimental study, showing the scalability of our approach and demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed algorithms.
Supervised learning typically focuses on learning transferable representations from training examples annotated by humans. While rich annotations (like soft labels) carry more information than sparse annotations (like hard labels), they are also more expensive to collect. For example, while hard labels only provide information about the closest class an object belongs to (e.g., "this is a dog"), soft labels provide information about the object's relationship with multiple classes (e.g., "this is most likely a dog, but it could also be a wolf or a coyote"). We use information theory to compare how a number of commonly-used supervision signals contribute to representation-learning performance, as well as how their capacity is affected by factors such as the number of labels, classes, dimensions, and noise. Our framework provides theoretical justification for using hard labels in the big-data regime, but richer supervision signals for few-shot learning and out-of-distribution generalization. We validate these results empirically in a series of experiments with over 1 million crowdsourced image annotations and conduct a cost-benefit analysis to establish a tradeoff curve that enables users to optimize the cost of supervising representation learning on their own datasets.
Artificial intelligence's progress holds great promise in assisting society in addressing pressing societal issues. In particular Large Language Models (LLM) and the derived chatbots, like ChatGPT, have highly improved the natural language processing capabilities of AI systems allowing them to process an unprecedented amount of unstructured data. The consequent hype has also backfired, raising negative sentiment even after novel AI methods' surprising contributions. One of the causes, but also an important issue per se, is the rising and misleading feeling of being able to access and process any form of knowledge to solve problems in any domain with no effort or previous expertise in AI or problem domain, disregarding current LLMs limits, such as hallucinations and reasoning limits. Acknowledging AI fallibility is crucial to address the impact of dogmatic overconfidence in possibly erroneous suggestions generated by LLMs. At the same time, it can reduce fear and other negative attitudes toward AI. AI literacy interventions are necessary that allow the public to understand such LLM limits and learn how to use them in a more effective manner, i.e. learning to "prompt". With this aim, a pilot educational intervention was performed in a high school with 30 students. It involved (i) presenting high-level concepts about intelligence, AI, and LLM, (ii) an initial naive practice with ChatGPT in a non-trivial task, and finally (iii) applying currently-accepted prompting strategies. Encouraging preliminary results have been collected such as students reporting a) high appreciation of the activity, b) improved quality of the interaction with the LLM during the educational activity, c) decreased negative sentiments toward AI, d) increased understanding of limitations and specifically We aim to study factors that impact AI acceptance and to refine and repeat this activity in more controlled settings.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
With the explosive growth of information technology, multi-view graph data have become increasingly prevalent and valuable. Most existing multi-view clustering techniques either focus on the scenario of multiple graphs or multi-view attributes. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster multi-view attributed graph data. Specifically, inspired by the success of contrastive learning, we propose multi-view contrastive graph clustering (MCGC) method to learn a consensus graph since the original graph could be noisy or incomplete and is not directly applicable. Our method composes of two key steps: we first filter out the undesirable high-frequency noise while preserving the graph geometric features via graph filtering and obtain a smooth representation of nodes; we then learn a consensus graph regularized by graph contrastive loss. Results on several benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our simple approach outperforms existing deep learning-based methods.
This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website //pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
Attributed graph clustering is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. Recent progress on graph convolutional networks has proved that graph convolution is effective in combining structural and content information, and several recent methods based on it have achieved promising clustering performance on some real attributed networks. However, there is limited understanding of how graph convolution affects clustering performance and how to properly use it to optimize performance for different graphs. Existing methods essentially use graph convolution of a fixed and low order that only takes into account neighbours within a few hops of each node, which underutilizes node relations and ignores the diversity of graphs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution method for attributed graph clustering that exploits high-order graph convolution to capture global cluster structure and adaptively selects the appropriate order for different graphs. We establish the validity of our method by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods.
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