Text-to-image models, which can generate high-quality images based on textual input, have recently enabled various content-creation tools. Despite significantly affecting a wide range of downstream applications, the distributions of these generated images are still not fully understood, especially when it comes to the potential stereotypical attributes of different genders. In this work, we propose a paradigm (Gender Presentation Differences) that utilizes fine-grained self-presentation attributes to study how gender is presented differently in text-to-image models. By probing gender indicators in the input text (e.g., "a woman" or "a man"), we quantify the frequency differences of presentation-centric attributes (e.g., "a shirt" and "a dress") through human annotation and introduce a novel metric: GEP. Furthermore, we propose an automatic method to estimate such differences. The automatic GEP metric based on our approach yields a higher correlation with human annotations than that based on existing CLIP scores, consistently across three state-of-the-art text-to-image models. Finally, we demonstrate the generalization ability of our metrics in the context of gender stereotypes related to occupations.

Machine learning techniques can provide an efficient and accurate means of predicting possible drug-drug interactions and combat the growing problem of adverse drug interactions. Most existing models for predicting interactions rely on the chemical properties of drugs. While such models can be accurate, the required properties are not always available. Results: In this article we address the drug-drug interaction issue as a link prediction problem and extend a method proposed by Shtar et al [1], which uses artificial neural networks and propagation over graph nodes in order to consider specific interactions when detecting drug-drug interactions. After extracting and analyzing the possible interactions, a table which presents the interactions as a one-hot vector between each pair of drugs is created. Then, a deep neural network (DNN) is used as a predictor.

We present a new learning-based framework S-3D-RCNN that can recover accurate object orientation in SO(3) and simultaneously predict implicit shapes for outdoor rigid objects from stereo RGB images. In contrast to previous studies that map local appearance to observation angles, we explore a progressive approach by extracting meaningful Intermediate Geometrical Representations (IGRs) to estimate egocentric object orientation. This approach features a deep model that transforms perceived intensities to object part coordinates, which are mapped to a 3D representation encoding object orientation in the camera coordinate system. To enable implicit shape estimation, the IGRs are further extended to model visible object surface with a point-based representation and explicitly addresses the unseen surface hallucination problem. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed IGRs and S-3D-RCNN achieves superior 3D scene understanding performance using existing and proposed new metrics on the KITTI benchmark. Code and pre-trained models will be available at this https URL.

The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is motivated by the desire of people not to be perpetually disadvantaged by their past deeds. For this, data deletion needs to be deep and permanent, and should be removed from machine learning models. Researchers have proposed machine unlearning algorithms which aim to erase specific data from trained models more efficiently. However, these methods modify how data is fed into the model and how training is done, which may subsequently compromise AI ethics from the fairness perspective. To help software engineers make responsible decisions when adopting these unlearning methods, we present the first study on machine unlearning methods to reveal their fairness implications. We designed and conducted experiments on two typical machine unlearning methods (SISA and AmnesiacML) along with a retraining method (ORTR) as baseline using three fairness datasets under three different deletion strategies. Experimental results show that under non-uniform data deletion, SISA leads to better fairness compared with ORTR and AmnesiacML, while initial training and uniform data deletion do not necessarily affect the fairness of all three methods. These findings have exposed an important research problem in software engineering, and can help practitioners better understand the potential trade-offs on fairness when considering solutions for RTBF.

Toxic conversations during software development interactions may have serious repercussions on a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development project. For example, victims of toxic conversations may become afraid to express themselves, therefore get demotivated, and may eventually leave the project. Automated filtering of toxic conversations may help a FOSS community to maintain healthy interactions among its members. However, off-the-shelf toxicity detectors perform poorly on Software Engineering (SE) datasets, such as one curated from code review comments. To encounter this challenge, we present ToxiCR, a supervised learning-based toxicity identification tool for code review interactions. ToxiCR includes a choice to select one of the ten supervised learning algorithms, an option to select text vectorization techniques, eight preprocessing steps, and a large-scale labeled dataset of 19,571 code review comments. Two out of those eight preprocessing steps are SE domain specific. With our rigorous evaluation of the models with various combinations of preprocessing steps and vectorization techniques, we have identified the best combination for our dataset that boosts 95.8% accuracy and 88.9% F1 score. ToxiCR significantly outperforms existing toxicity detectors on our dataset. We have released our dataset, pre-trained models, evaluation results, and source code publicly available at: https://github.com/WSU-SEAL/ToxiCR

Recent works have shown that selecting an optimal model architecture suited to the differential privacy setting is necessary to achieve the best possible utility for a given privacy budget using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD)(Tramer and Boneh 2020; Cheng et al. 2022). In light of these findings, we empirically analyse how different fairness notions, belonging to distinct classes of statistical fairness criteria (independence, separation and sufficiency), are impacted when one selects a model architecture suitable for DP-SGD, optimized for utility. Using standard datasets from ML fairness literature, we show using a rigorous experimental protocol, that by selecting the optimal model architecture for DP-SGD, the differences across groups concerning the relevant fairness metrics (demographic parity, equalized odds and predictive parity) more often decrease or are negligibly impacted, compared to the non-private baseline, for which optimal model architecture has also been selected to maximize utility. These findings challenge the understanding that differential privacy will necessarily exacerbate unfairness in deep learning models trained on biased datasets.

Many stakeholders struggle to make reliances on ML-driven systems due to the risk of harm these systems may cause. Concerns of trustworthiness, unintended social harms, and unacceptable social and ethical violations undermine the promise of ML advancements. Moreover, such risks in complex ML-driven systems present a special challenge as they are often difficult to foresee, arising over periods of time, across populations, and at scale. These risks often arise not from poor ML development decisions or low performance directly but rather emerge through the interactions amongst ML development choices, the context of model use, environmental factors, and the effects of a model on its target. Systems safety engineering is an established discipline with a proven track record of identifying and managing risks even in high-complexity sociotechnical systems. In this work, we apply a state-of-the-art systems safety approach to concrete applications of ML with notable social and ethical risks to demonstrate a systematic means for meeting the assurance requirements needed to argue for safe and trustworthy ML in sociotechnical systems.

Personalized recommendations have become a common feature of modern online services, including most major e-commerce sites, media platforms and social networks. Today, due to their high practical relevance, research in the area of recommender systems is flourishing more than ever. However, with the new application scenarios of recommender systems that we observe today, constantly new challenges arise as well, both in terms of algorithmic requirements and with respect to the evaluation of such systems. In this paper, we first provide an overview of the traditional formulation of the recommendation problem. We then review the classical algorithmic paradigms for item retrieval and ranking and elaborate how such systems can be evaluated. Afterwards, we discuss a number of recent developments in recommender systems research, including research on session-based recommendation, biases in recommender systems, and questions regarding the impact and value of recommender systems in practice.

One of the critical factors that drive the economic development of a country and guarantee the sustainability of its industries is the constant availability of electricity. This is usually provided by the national electric grid. However, in developing countries where companies are emerging on a constant basis including telecommunication industries, those are still experiencing a non-stable electricity supply. Therefore, they have to rely on generators to guarantee their full functionality. Those generators depend on fuel to function and the rate of consumption gets usually high, if not monitored properly. Monitoring operation is usually carried out by a (non-expert) human. In some cases, this could be a tedious process, as some companies have reported an exaggerated high consumption rate. This work proposes a label assisted autoencoder for anomaly detection in the fuel consumed by power generating plants. In addition to the autoencoder model, we added a labelling assistance module that checks if an observation is labelled, the label is used to check the veracity of the corresponding anomaly classification given a threshold. A consensus is then reached on whether training should stop or whether the threshold should be updated or the training should continue with the search for hyper-parameters. Results show that the proposed model is highly efficient for reading anomalies with a detection accuracy of $97.20\%$ which outperforms the existing model of $96.1\%$ accuracy trained on the same dataset. In addition, the proposed model is able to classify the anomalies according to their degree of severity.

This study explores the use of the Dirichlet Variational Autoencoder (DirVAE) for learning disentangled latent representations of chest X-ray (CXR) images. Our working hypothesis is that distributional sparsity, as facilitated by the Dirichlet prior, will encourage disentangled feature learning for the complex task of multi-label classification of CXR images. The DirVAE is trained using CXR images from the CheXpert database, and the predictive capacity of multi-modal latent representations learned by DirVAE models is investigated through implementation of an auxiliary multi-label classification task, with a view to enforce separation of latent factors according to class-specific features. The predictive performance and explainability of the latent space learned using the DirVAE were quantitatively and qualitatively assessed, respectively, and compared with a standard Gaussian prior-VAE (GVAE). We introduce a new approach for explainable multi-label classification in which we conduct gradient-guided latent traversals for each class of interest. Study findings indicate that the DirVAE is able to disentangle latent factors into class-specific visual features, a property not afforded by the GVAE, and achieve a marginal increase in predictive performance relative to GVAE. We generate visual examples to show that our explainability method, when applied to the trained DirVAE, is able to highlight regions in CXR images that are clinically relevant to the class(es) of interest and additionally, can identify cases where classification relies on spurious feature correlations.