The vast majority of techniques to train fair models require access to the protected attribute (e.g., race, gender), either at train time or in production. However, in many important applications this protected attribute is largely unavailable. In this paper, we develop methods for measuring and reducing fairness violations in a setting with limited access to protected attribute labels. Specifically, we assume access to protected attribute labels on a small subset of the dataset of interest, but only probabilistic estimates of protected attribute labels (e.g., via Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding) for the rest of the dataset. With this setting in mind, we propose a method to estimate bounds on common fairness metrics for an existing model, as well as a method for training a model to limit fairness violations by solving a constrained non-convex optimization problem. Unlike similar existing approaches, our methods take advantage of contextual information -- specifically, the relationships between a model's predictions and the probabilistic prediction of protected attributes, given the true protected attribute, and vice versa -- to provide tighter bounds on the true disparity. We provide an empirical illustration of our methods using voting data. First, we show our measurement method can bound the true disparity up to 5.5x tighter than previous methods in these applications. Then, we demonstrate that our training technique effectively reduces disparity while incurring lesser fairness-accuracy trade-offs than other fair optimization methods with limited access to protected attributes.

Split conformal prediction has recently sparked great interest due to its ability to provide formally guaranteed uncertainty sets or intervals for predictions made by black-box neural models, ensuring a predefined probability of containing the actual ground truth. While the original formulation assumes data exchangeability, some extensions handle non-exchangeable data, which is often the case in many real-world scenarios. In parallel, some progress has been made in conformal methods that provide statistical guarantees for a broader range of objectives, such as bounding the best F1-score or minimizing the false negative rate in expectation. In this paper, we leverage and extend these two lines of work by proposing non-exchangeable conformal risk control, which allows controlling the expected value of any monotone loss function when the data is not exchangeable. Our framework is flexible, makes very few assumptions, and allows weighting the data based on its statistical similarity with the test examples; a careful choice of weights may result on tighter bounds, making our framework useful in the presence of change points, time series, or other forms of distribution drift. Experiments with both synthetic and real world data show the usefulness of our method.

Modern successes of diffusion models in learning complex, high-dimensional data distributions are attributed, in part, to their capability to construct diffusion processes with analytic transition kernels and score functions. The tractability results in a simulation-free framework with stable regression losses, from which reversed, generative processes can be learned at scale. However, when data is confined to a constrained set as opposed to a standard Euclidean space, these desirable characteristics appear to be lost based on prior attempts. In this work, we propose Mirror Diffusion Models (MDM), a new class of diffusion models that generate data on convex constrained sets without losing any tractability. This is achieved by learning diffusion processes in a dual space constructed from a mirror map, which, crucially, is a standard Euclidean space. We derive efficient computation of mirror maps for popular constrained sets, such as simplices and $\ell_2$-balls, showing significantly improved performance of MDM over existing methods. For safety and privacy purposes, we also explore constrained sets as a new mechanism to embed invisible but quantitative information (i.e., watermarks) in generated data, for which MDM serves as a compelling approach. Our work brings new algorithmic opportunities for learning tractable diffusion on complex domains.

An invasive species of grass known as "buffelgrass" contributes to severe wildfires and biodiversity loss in the Southwest United States. We tackle the problem of predicting buffelgrass "green-ups" (i.e. readiness for herbicidal treatment). To make our predictions, we explore temporal, visual and multi-modal models that combine satellite sensing and deep learning. We find that all of our neural-based approaches improve over conventional buffelgrass green-up models, and discuss how neural model deployment promises significant resource savings.

Mitigating Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks is vital for online service security and availability. While machine learning (ML) models are used for DoS attack detection, new strategies are needed to enhance their performance. We suggest an innovative method, combinatorial fusion, which combines multiple ML models using advanced algorithms. This includes score and rank combinations, weighted techniques, and diversity strength of scoring systems. Through rigorous evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this fusion approach, considering metrics like precision, recall, and F1-score. We address the challenge of low-profiled attack classification by fusing models to create a comprehensive solution. Our findings emphasize the potential of this approach to improve DoS attack detection and contribute to stronger defense mechanisms.

Class incremental learning (CIL) is a challenging setting of continual learning, which learns a series of tasks sequentially. Each task consists of a set of unique classes. The key feature of CIL is that no task identifier (or task-id) is provided at test time for each test sample. Predicting the task-id for each test sample is a challenging problem. An emerging theoretically justified and effective approach is to train a task-specific model for each task in a shared network for all tasks based on a task-incremental learning (TIL) method to deal with forgetting. The model for each task in this approach is an out-of-distribution (OOD) detector rather than a conventional classifier. The OOD detector can perform both within-task (in-distribution (IND)) class prediction and OOD detection. The OOD detection capability is the key for task-id prediction during inference for each test sample. However, this paper argues that using a traditional OOD detector for task-id prediction is sub-optimal because additional information (e.g., the replay data and the learned tasks) available in CIL can be exploited to design a better and principled method for task-id prediction. We call the new method TPLR (Task-id Prediction based on Likelihood Ratio}). TPLR markedly outperforms strong CIL baselines.

Social media platforms play an essential role in crisis communication, but analyzing crisis-related social media texts is challenging due to their informal nature. Transformer-based pre-trained models like BERT and RoBERTa have shown success in various NLP tasks, but they are not tailored for crisis-related texts. Furthermore, general-purpose sentence encoders are used to generate sentence embeddings, regardless of the textual complexities in crisis-related texts. Advances in applications like text classification, semantic search, and clustering contribute to effective processing of crisis-related texts, which is essential for emergency responders to gain a comprehensive view of a crisis event, whether historical or real-time. To address these gaps in crisis informatics literature, this study introduces CrisisTransformers, an ensemble of pre-trained language models and sentence encoders trained on an extensive corpus of over 15 billion word tokens from tweets associated with more than 30 crisis events, including disease outbreaks, natural disasters, conflicts, and other critical incidents. We evaluate existing models and CrisisTransformers on 18 crisis-specific public datasets. Our pre-trained models outperform strong baselines across all datasets in classification tasks, and our best-performing sentence encoder improves the state-of-the-art by 17.43% in sentence encoding tasks. Additionally, we investigate the impact of model initialization on convergence and evaluate the significance of domain-specific models in generating semantically meaningful sentence embeddings. All models are publicly released (https://huggingface.co/crisistransformers), with the anticipation that they will serve as a robust baseline for tasks involving the analysis of crisis-related social media texts.

Liberalism-oriented political philosophy reasons that all individuals should be treated equally independently of their protected characteristics. Related work in machine learning has translated the concept of \emph{equal treatment} into terms of \emph{equal outcome} and measured it as \emph{demographic parity} (also called \emph{statistical parity}). Our analysis reveals that the two concepts of equal outcome and equal treatment diverge; therefore, demographic parity does not faithfully represent the notion of \emph{equal treatment}. We propose a new formalization for equal treatment by (i) considering the influence of feature values on predictions, such as computed by Shapley values decomposing predictions across its features, (ii) defining distributions of explanations, and (iii) comparing explanation distributions between populations with different protected characteristics. We show the theoretical properties of our notion of equal treatment and devise a classifier two-sample test based on the AUC of an equal treatment inspector. We study our formalization of equal treatment on synthetic and natural data. We release \texttt{explanationspace}, an open-source Python package with methods and tutorials.

We consider an important problem in scientific discovery, namely identifying sparse governing equations for nonlinear dynamical systems. This involves solving sparse ridge regression problems to provable optimality in order to determine which terms drive the underlying dynamics. We propose a fast algorithm, OKRidge, for sparse ridge regression, using a novel lower bound calculation involving, first, a saddle point formulation, and from there, either solving (i) a linear system or (ii) using an ADMM-based approach, where the proximal operators can be efficiently evaluated by solving another linear system and an isotonic regression problem. We also propose a method to warm-start our solver, which leverages a beam search. Experimentally, our methods attain provable optimality with run times that are orders of magnitude faster than those of the existing MIP formulations solved by the commercial solver Gurobi.

Joint multimodal functional data acquisition, where functional data from multiple modes are measured simultaneously from the same subject, has emerged as an exciting modern approach enabled by recent engineering breakthroughs in the neurological and biological sciences. One prominent motivation to acquire such data is to enable new discoveries of the underlying connectivity by combining multimodal signals. Despite the scientific interest, there remains a gap in principled statistical methods for estimating the graph underlying multimodal functional data. To this end, we propose a new integrative framework that models the data generation process and identifies operators mapping from the observation space to the latent space. We then develop an estimator that simultaneously estimates the transformation operators and the latent graph. This estimator is based on the partial correlation operator, which we rigorously extend from the multivariate to the functional setting. Our procedure is provably efficient, with the estimator converging to a stationary point with quantifiable statistical error. Furthermore, we show recovery of the latent graph under mild conditions. Our work is applied to analyze simultaneously acquired multimodal brain imaging data where the graph indicates functional connectivity of the brain. We present simulation and empirical results that support the benefits of joint estimation.