While the inverse sensitivity mechanism was shown to be instance optimal, it was only with respect to a class of unbiased mechanisms such that the most likely outcome matches the underlying data.

The Equalized Odds (for short, EO) is one of the most popular measures of discrimination used in the supervised learning setting. It ascertains fairness through the balance of the misclassification rates (false positive and negative) across the protected groups - e.g., in the context of law enforcement, an African-American defendant who would not commit a future crime will have an equal opportunity of being released, compared to a non-recidivating Caucasian defendant. Despite this noble goal, it has been acknowledged in the literature that statistical tests based on the EO are oblivious to the underlying causal mechanisms that generated the disparity in the first place (Hardt et al. 2016). This leads to a critical disconnect between statistical measures readable from the data and the meaning of discrimination in the legal system, where compelling evidence that the observed disparity is tied to a specific causal process deemed unfair by society is required to characterize discrimination. The goal of this paper is to develop a principled approach to connect the statistical disparities characterized by the EO and the underlying, elusive, and frequently unobserved, causal mechanisms that generated such inequality. We start by introducing a new family of counterfactual measures that allows one to explain the misclassification disparities in terms of the underlying mechanisms in an arbitrary, non-parametric structural causal model. This will, in turn, allow legal and data analysts to interpret currently deployed classifiers through causal lens, linking the statistical disparities found in the data to the corresponding causal processes. Leveraging the new family of counterfactual measures, we develop a learning procedure to construct a classifier that is statistically efficient, interpretable, and compatible with the basic human intuition of fairness. We demonstrate our results through experiments in both real (COMPAS) and synthetic datasets.

Multiscale-structured miniaturized 3D force sensors CC BY 4.0 Robots are becoming increasingly capable in vision and movement, yet touch remains one of their major weaknesses. Now, researchers have developed a miniature tactile sensor that could give robots something much closer to a human sense of touch. The technology, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, is based on liquid metal composites and graphene - a two-dimensional form of carbon. The'skin' allows robots to detect not just how hard they are pressing on an object, but also the direction of applied forces, whether an object is slipping, and even how rough a surface is, at a scale small enough to rival the spatial resolution of human fingertips. Their results are reported in the journal .

The remains of a Bronze Age loom highlights a turning point in human history. Recreation of an area of activities related to textile work as documented at Cabezo Redondo. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Clothes make the man, and have helped keep humans from freezing for thousands of years. But how exactly did Bronze Age people make their clothes?

Author Wynton Hall alleges Google Gemini flagged Republican senators' rhetoric as hate speech while identifying no Democratic violations, raising questions about AI bias.

If you haven’t tried Claude yet or want to tinker with a “frontier” AI model, now’s the time.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

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