Africa
Assessing the Fairness of AI Systems: AI Practitioners' Processes, Challenges, and Needs for Support
Madaio, Michael, Egede, Lisa, Subramonyam, Hariharan, Vaughan, Jennifer Wortman, Wallach, Hanna
Various tools and practices have been developed to support practitioners in identifying, assessing, and mitigating fairness-related harms caused by AI systems. However, prior research has highlighted gaps between the intended design of these tools and practices and their use within particular contexts, including gaps caused by the role that organizational factors play in shaping fairness work. In this paper, we investigate these gaps for one such practice: disaggregated evaluations of AI systems, intended to uncover performance disparities between demographic groups. By conducting semi-structured interviews and structured workshops with thirty-three AI practitioners from ten teams at three technology companies, we identify practitioners' processes, challenges, and needs for support when designing disaggregated evaluations. We find that practitioners face challenges when choosing performance metrics, identifying the most relevant direct stakeholders and demographic groups on which to focus, and collecting datasets with which to conduct disaggregated evaluations. More generally, we identify impacts on fairness work stemming from a lack of engagement with direct stakeholders, business imperatives that prioritize customers over marginalized groups, and the drive to deploy AI systems at scale.
Unsupervised Editing for Counterfactual Stories
Chen, Jiangjie, Gan, Chun, Cheng, Sijie, Zhou, Hao, Xiao, Yanghua, Li, Lei
Creating what-if stories requires reasoning about prior statements and possible outcomes of the changed conditions. One can easily generate coherent endings under new conditions, but it would be challenging for current systems to do it with minimal changes to the original story. Therefore, one major challenge is the trade-off between generating a logical story and rewriting with minimal-edits. In this paper, we propose EDUCAT, an editing-based unsupervised approach for counterfactual story rewriting. EDUCAT includes a target position detection strategy based on estimating causal effects of the what-if conditions, which keeps the causal invariant parts of the story. EDUCAT then generates the stories under fluency, coherence and minimal-edits constraints. We also propose a new metric to alleviate the shortcomings of current automatic metrics and better evaluate the trade-off. We evaluate EDUCAT on a public counterfactual story rewriting benchmark. Experiments show that EDUCAT achieves the best trade-off over unsupervised SOTA methods according to both automatic and human evaluation. The resources of EDUCAT are available at: https://github.com/jiangjiechen/EDUCAT.
Blockwise Sequential Model Learning for Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning
Park, Giseung, Choi, Sungho, Sung, Youngchul
This paper proposes a new sequential model learning architecture to solve partially observable Markov decision problems. Rather than compressing sequential information at every timestep as in conventional recurrent neural network-based methods, the proposed architecture generates a latent variable in each data block with a length of multiple timesteps and passes the most relevant information to the next block for policy optimization. The proposed blockwise sequential model is implemented based on self-attention, making the model capable of detailed sequential learning in partial observable settings. The proposed model builds an additional learning network to efficiently implement gradient estimation by using self-normalized importance sampling, which does not require the complex blockwise input data reconstruction in the model learning. Numerical results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous methods in various partially observable environments.
SAP BrandVoice: AI Trends 2022: Spare Us The Hype, We Want Business Results
If you thought judgment, ethics, and even creativity were the unique purview of humans, think again. The latest industry analyst predictions about artificial intelligence (AI) are out, and they're certain to oust a ton of assumptions we've made to date. Read on to find out just how smart, creative, and sincere AI will become during the next few years. Organizations are just starting to tap the incredible computational powers of AI for creativity, human productivity, and business results. Noting that South Africa granted the first patent to a creative AI system in 2021, Forrester researchers predicted creative AI systems will win dozens of patents in 2022.
Edge Artificial Intelligence Market Research Report by Processor, by Component, by Source, by End-Use, by Application, by Region - Global Forecast to 2026 - Cumulative Impact of COVID-19
GNW The Global Edge Artificial Intelligence Market size was estimated at USD 572.00 million in 2020 and expected to reach USD 701.73 million in 2021, at a CAGR 23.35% to reach USD 2,014.99 million by 2026. Market Statistics: The report provides market sizing and forecast across five major currencies - USD, EUR GBP, JPY, and AUD. It helps organization leaders make better decisions when currency exchange data is readily available. In this report, the years 2018 and 2019 are considered historical years, 2020 as the base year, 2021 as the estimated year, and years from 2022 to 2026 are considered the forecast period. Market Segmentation & Coverage: This research report categorizes the Edge Artificial Intelligence to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets: Based on Processor, the market was studied across ASIC, CPU, and GPU.
Leveraging machine learning to rapidly discover novel beneficial microbes
When you think about agriculture, what comes to mind? Tractors? Fields of corn? Big red barns? Often we don't think of computers. But computers and technology are playing a huge role in making our food system more sustainable and reliable. In the past few decades, high-tech machinery and robotics have changed the agroindustry. High-tech farming is making our crops more resilient against pathogens, harvest times more precise, and food yields more robust. Next-generation sequencing and machine learning now make high-tech advances possible at the genome level, particularly when untangling plant-microbe interactions. As technology advances, we can leverage these tools to promote sustainable agricultural practices.
A New Measure of Model Redundancy for Compressed Convolutional Neural Networks
Huang, Feiqing, Si, Yuefeng, Zheng, Yao, Li, Guodong
While recently many designs have been proposed to improve the model efficiency of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a fixed resource budget, theoretical understanding of these designs is still conspicuously lacking. This paper aims to provide a new framework for answering the question: Is there still any remaining model redundancy in a compressed CNN? We begin by developing a general statistical formulation of CNNs and compressed CNNs via the tensor decomposition, such that the weights across layers can be summarized into a single tensor. Then, through a rigorous sample complexity analysis, we reveal an important discrepancy between the derived sample complexity and the naive parameter counting, which serves as a direct indicator of the model redundancy. Motivated by this finding, we introduce a new model redundancy measure for compressed CNNs, called the $K/R$ ratio, which further allows for nonlinear activations. The usefulness of this new measure is supported by ablation studies on popular block designs and datasets.
Learning Generalizable Behavior via Visual Rewrite Rules
Xie, Yiheng, Li, Mingxuan, Yu, Shangqun, Littman, Michael
Though deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved unprecedented success in recent years, their learned policies can be brittle, failing to generalize to even slight modifications of their environments or unfamiliar situations. The black-box nature of the neural network learning dynamics makes it impossible to audit trained deep agents and recover from such failures. In this paper, we propose a novel representation and learning approach to capture environment dynamics without using neural networks. It originates from the observation that, in games designed for people, the effect of an action can often be perceived in the form of local changes in consecutive visual observations. Our algorithm is designed to extract such vision-based changes and condense them into a set of action-dependent descriptive rules, which we call ''visual rewrite rules'' (VRRs). We also present preliminary results from a VRR agent that can explore, expand its rule set, and solve a game via planning with its learned VRR world model. In several classical games, our non-deep agent demonstrates superior performance, extreme sample efficiency, and robust generalization ability compared with several mainstream deep agents.
Extending the WILDS Benchmark for Unsupervised Adaptation
Sagawa, Shiori, Koh, Pang Wei, Lee, Tony, Gao, Irena, Xie, Sang Michael, Shen, Kendrick, Kumar, Ananya, Hu, Weihua, Yasunaga, Michihiro, Marklund, Henrik, Beery, Sara, David, Etienne, Stavness, Ian, Guo, Wei, Leskovec, Jure, Saenko, Kate, Hashimoto, Tatsunori, Levine, Sergey, Finn, Chelsea, Liang, Percy
Machine learning systems deployed in the wild are often trained on a source distribution but deployed on a different target distribution. Unlabeled data can be a powerful point of leverage for mitigating these distribution shifts, as it is frequently much more available than labeled data. However, existing distribution shift benchmarks for unlabeled data do not reflect the breadth of scenarios that arise in real-world applications. In this work, we present the WILDS 2.0 update, which extends 8 of the 10 datasets in the WILDS benchmark of distribution shifts to include curated unlabeled data that would be realistically obtainable in deployment. To maintain consistency, the labeled training, validation, and test sets, as well as the evaluation metrics, are exactly the same as in the original WILDS benchmark. These datasets span a wide range of applications (from histology to wildlife conservation), tasks (classification, regression, and detection), and modalities (photos, satellite images, microscope slides, text, molecular graphs). We systematically benchmark state-of-the-art methods that leverage unlabeled data, including domain-invariant, self-training, and self-supervised methods, and show that their success on WILDS 2.0 is limited. To facilitate method development and evaluation, we provide an open-source package that automates data loading and contains all of the model architectures and methods used in this paper. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.
Facebook Says Its New AI Can Identify More Problems Faster
A recent trove of documents leaked from Facebook demonstrated how the social network struggles to moderate dangerous content in places far from Silicon Valley. Internal discussions revealed worries that moderation algorithms for the languages spoken in Pakistan and Ethiopia were insufficient, and that the company lacked adequate training data to tune systems to different dialects of Arabic. Meta Platforms, Facebook's owner, now says it has deployed a new artificial intelligence moderation system for some tasks that can be adapted to new enforcement jobs more quickly than its predecessors because it requires much less training data. The company says the system, called Few-Shot Learner, works in more than 100 languages and can operate on images as well as text. Facebook says Few-Shot Learner makes it possible to automate enforcement of a new moderation rule in about six weeks, down from around six months.