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Retiring Adult: New Datasets for Fair Machine Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Although the fairness community has recognized the importance of data, re-searchers in the area primarily rely on UCIAdult when it comes to tabular data. Derived from a 1994 USCensus survey, this dataset has appeared in hundreds of research papers where it served as the basis for the development and comparison of many algorithmic fairness interventions. We reconstruct a superset of the UCI Adult data from available USCensus sources and reveal idiosyncrasies of the UCIAdult dataset that limit its external validity. Our primary contribution is asuite of new datasets derived from USCensus surveys that extend the existing data ecosystem for research on fair machine learning. We create prediction tasks relating to income, employment, health, transportation, and housing. The data span multiple years and all states of the United States, allowing researchers to studytemporal shift and geographic variation. We highlight a broad initial sweep of new empirical insights relating to trade-offs between fairness criteria, performance of algorithmic interventions, and the role of distribution shift based on our new datasets. Our findings inform ongoing debates, challenge some existing narratives, and point to future research directions.


The Online Civil War About 'Michael' Is a Battle Over Truth

WIRED

Fans want to reclaim the music and myth of Michael Jackson in the new biopic while critics call for accountability. Still from, which opened April 24. Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches? If so, --a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was--intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue. The film's release has sparked a familiar but newly intensified civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.


With A.I., Anyone Can Be an Influencer

The New Yorker

With A.I., Anyone Can Be an Influencer TikTok and Instagram made it easy to monetize the physical self. Now the social-media-savvy can use A.I. to play with their identity, or overhaul it entirely. A few months ago, a forty-five-year-old homemaker living in Georgia, whom I'll call Robin, started playing around with an A.I. image generator. Growing up, Robin had loved reading; she dabbled in writing, too, but after her first child was born, the habit faded. A.I. offered something different--a kind of world-building that allowed her to project herself into places and situations she'd never inhabited.



Scaling Gaussian Processes with Derivative Information Using Variational Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Gaussian processes with derivative information are useful in many settings where derivative information is available, including numerous Bayesian optimization and regression tasks that arise in the natural sciences. Incorporating derivative observations, however, comes with a dominating O(N3D3) computational cost when training on N points in D input dimensions. This is intractable for even moderately sized problems. While recent work has addressed this intractability in the low-Dsetting, the high-N, high-Dsetting is still unexplored and of great value, particularly as machine learning problems increasingly become high dimensional. In this paper, we introduce methods to achieve fully scalable Gaussian process regression with derivatives using variational inference. Analogous to the use of inducing values to sparsify the labels of a training set, we introduce the concept of inducing directional derivatives to sparsify the partial derivative information of a training set. This enables us to construct a variational posterior that incorporates derivative information but whose size depends neither on the full dataset size N nor the full dimensionality D. We demonstrate the full scalability of our approach on a variety of tasks, ranging from a high dimensional stellarator fusion regression task to training graph convolutional neural networks on Pubmed using Bayesian optimization. Surprisingly, we find that our approach can improve regression performance even in settings where only label data is available.


TopP&R: Robust Support Estimation Approach for Evaluating Fidelity and Diversity in Generative Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a robust and reliable evaluation metric for generative models called Topological Precision and Recall (TopP&R, pronounced "topper"), which systematically estimates supports by retaining only topologically and statistically significant features with a certain level of confidence. Existing metrics, such as Inception Score (IS), Frรฉchet Inception Distance (FID), and various Precision and Recall(P&R) variants, rely heavily on support estimates derived from sample features. However, the reliability of these estimates has been overlooked, even though the quality of the evaluation hinges entirely on their accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that current methods not only fail to accurately assess sample quality when support estimation is unreliable, but also yield inconsistent results. In contrast, TopP&R reliably evaluates the sample quality and ensures statistical consistency in its results. Our theoretical and experimental findings reveal that TopP&R provides a robust evaluation, accurately capturing the true trend of change in samples, even in the presence of outliers and non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) perturbations where other methods result in inaccurate support estimations. To our knowledge, TopP&Ris the first evaluation metric specifically focused on the robust estimation of supports, offering statistical consistency under noise conditions.


Imitating Deep Learning Dynamics via Locally Elastic Stochastic Differential Equations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Understanding the training dynamics of deep learning models is perhaps a necessary step toward demystifying the effectiveness of these models. In particular, how do data from different classes gradually become separable in their feature spaces when training neural networks using stochastic gradient descent?