Accuracy
seeBias: A Comprehensive Tool for Assessing and Visualizing AI Fairness
Ning, Yilin, Ma, Yian, Liu, Mingxuan, Li, Xin, Liu, Nan
Fairness in artificial intelligence (AI) prediction models is increasingly emphasized to support responsible adoption in high-stakes domains such as health care and criminal justice. Guidelines and implementation frameworks highlight the importance of both predictive accuracy and equitable outcomes. However, current fairness toolkits often evaluate classification performance disparities in isolation, with limited attention to other critical aspects such as calibration. To address these gaps, we present seeBias, an R package for comprehensive evaluation of model fairness and predictive performance. seeBias offers an integrated evaluation across classification, calibration, and other performance domains, providing a more complete view of model behavior. It includes customizable visualizations to support transparent reporting and responsible AI implementation. Using public datasets from criminal justice and healthcare, we demonstrate how seeBias supports fairness evaluations, and uncovers disparities that conventional fairness metrics may overlook. The R package is available on GitHub, and a Python version is under development.
SAEs $\textit{Can}$ Improve Unlearning: Dynamic Sparse Autoencoder Guardrails for Precision Unlearning in LLMs
Muhamed, Aashiq, Bonato, Jacopo, Diab, Mona, Smith, Virginia
Machine unlearning is a promising approach to improve LLM safety by removing unwanted knowledge from the model. However, prevailing gradient-based unlearning methods suffer from issues such as high computational costs, hyperparameter instability, poor sequential unlearning capability, vulnerability to relearning attacks, low data efficiency, and lack of interpretability. While Sparse Autoencoders are well-suited to improve these aspects by enabling targeted activation-based unlearning, prior approaches underperform gradient-based methods. This work demonstrates that, contrary to these earlier findings, SAEs can significantly improve unlearning when employed dynamically. We introduce $\textbf{Dynamic DAE Guardrails}$ (DSG), a novel method for precision unlearning that leverages principled feature selection and a dynamic classifier. Our experiments show DSG substantially outperforms leading unlearning methods, achieving superior forget-utility trade-offs. DSG addresses key drawbacks of gradient-based approaches for unlearning -- offering enhanced computational efficiency and stability, robust performance in sequential unlearning, stronger resistance to relearning attacks, better data efficiency including zero-shot settings, and more interpretable unlearning.
Adaptive Bounded Exploration and Intermediate Actions for Data Debiasing
Yang, Yifan, Liu, Yang, Naghizadeh, Parinaz
The performance of algorithmic decision rules is largely dependent on the quality of training datasets available to them. Biases in these datasets can raise economic and ethical concerns due to the resulting algorithms' disparate treatment of different groups. In this paper, we propose algorithms for sequentially debiasing the training dataset through adaptive and bounded exploration in a classification problem with costly and censored feedback. Our proposed algorithms balance between the ultimate goal of mitigating the impacts of data biases -- which will in turn lead to more accurate and fairer decisions, and the exploration risks incurred to achieve this goal. Specifically, we propose adaptive bounds to limit the region of exploration, and leverage intermediate actions which provide noisy label information at a lower cost. We analytically show that such exploration can help debias data in certain distributions, investigate how {algorithmic fairness interventions} can work in conjunction with our proposed algorithms, and validate the performance of these algorithms through numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data.
A Multi-Modal AI System for Screening Mammography: Integrating 2D and 3D Imaging to Improve Breast Cancer Detection in a Prospective Clinical Study
Park, Jungkyu, Witowski, Jan, Xu, Yanqi, Trivedi, Hari, Gichoya, Judy, Brown-Mulry, Beatrice, Westerhoff, Malte, Moy, Linda, Heacock, Laura, Lewin, Alana, Geras, Krzysztof J.
Although digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) improves diagnostic performance over full-field digital mammography (FFDM), false-positive recalls remain a concern in breast cancer screening. We developed a multi-modal artificial intelligence system integrating FFDM, synthetic mammography, and DBT to provide breast-level predictions and bounding-box localizations of suspicious findings. Our AI system, trained on approximately 500,000 mammography exams, achieved 0.945 AUROC on an internal test set. It demonstrated capacity to reduce recalls by 31.7% and radiologist workload by 43.8% while maintaining 100% sensitivity, underscoring its potential to improve clinical workflows. External validation confirmed strong generalizability, reducing the gap to a perfect AUROC by 35.31%-69.14% relative to strong baselines. In prospective deployment across 18 sites, the system reduced recall rates for low-risk cases. An improved version, trained on over 750,000 exams with additional labels, further reduced the gap by 18.86%-56.62% across large external datasets. Overall, these results underscore the importance of utilizing all available imaging modalities, demonstrate the potential for clinical impact, and indicate feasibility of further reduction of the test error with increased training set when using large-capacity neural networks.
Towards Responsible and Trustworthy Educational Data Mining: Comparing Symbolic, Sub-Symbolic, and Neural-Symbolic AI Methods
Hooshyar, Danial, Kikas, Eve, Yang, Yeongwook, ล รญr, Gustav, Hรคmรคlรคinen, Raija, Kรคrkkรคinen, Tommi, Azevedo, Roger
Given the demand for responsible and trustworthy AI for education, this study evaluates symbolic, sub-symbolic, and neural-symbolic AI (NSAI) in terms of generalizability and interpretability. Our extensive experiments on balanced and imbalanced self-regulated learning datasets of Estonian primary school students predicting 7th-grade mathematics national test performance showed that symbolic and sub-symbolic methods performed well on balanced data but struggled to identify low performers in imbalanced datasets. Interestingly, symbolic and sub-symbolic methods emphasized different factors in their decision-making: symbolic approaches primarily relied on cognitive and motivational factors, while sub-symbolic methods focused more on cognitive aspects, learnt knowledge, and the demographic variable of gender -- yet both largely overlooked metacognitive factors. The NSAI method, on the other hand, showed advantages by: (i) being more generalizable across both classes -- even in imbalanced datasets -- as its symbolic knowledge component compensated for the underrepresented class; and (ii) relying on a more integrated set of factors in its decision-making, including motivation, (meta)cognition, and learnt knowledge, thus offering a comprehensive and theoretically grounded interpretability framework. These contrasting findings highlight the need for a holistic comparison of AI methods before drawing conclusions based solely on predictive performance. They also underscore the potential of hybrid, human-centred NSAI methods to address the limitations of other AI families and move us closer to responsible AI for education. Specifically, by enabling stakeholders to contribute to AI design, NSAI aligns learned patterns with theoretical constructs, incorporates factors like motivation and metacognition, and strengthens the trustworthiness and responsibility of educational data mining.
Self-Bootstrapping for Versatile Test-Time Adaptation
Niu, Shuaicheng, Chen, Guohao, Zhao, Peilin, Wang, Tianyi, Wu, Pengcheng, Shen, Zhiqi
In this paper, we seek to develop a versatile test-time adaptation (TTA) objective for a variety of tasks - classification and regression across image-, object-, and pixel-level predictions. We achieve this through a self-bootstrapping scheme that optimizes prediction consistency between the test image (as target) and its deteriorated view. The key challenge lies in devising effective augmentations/deteriorations that: i) preserve the image's geometric information, e.g., object sizes and locations, which is crucial for TTA on object/pixel-level tasks, and ii) provide sufficient learning signals for TTA. To this end, we analyze how common distribution shifts affect the image's information power across spatial frequencies in the Fourier domain, and reveal that low-frequency components carry high power and masking these components supplies more learning signals, while masking high-frequency components can not. In light of this, we randomly mask the low-frequency amplitude of an image in its Fourier domain for augmentation. Meanwhile, we also augment the image with noise injection to compensate for missing learning signals at high frequencies, by enhancing the information power there. Experiments show that, either independently or as a plug-and-play module, our method achieves superior results across classification, segmentation, and 3D monocular detection tasks with both transformer and CNN models.
Regretful Decisions under Label Noise
Nagaraj, Sujay, Liu, Yang, Calmon, Flavio P., Ustun, Berk
Machine learning models are routinely used to support decisions that affect individuals - be it to screen a patient for a serious illness or to gauge their response to treatment. In these tasks, we are limited to learning models from datasets with noisy labels. In this paper, we study the instance-level impact of learning under label noise. We introduce a notion of regret for this regime which measures the number of unforeseen mistakes due to noisy labels. We show that standard approaches to learning under label noise can return models that perform well at a population level while subjecting individuals to a lottery of mistakes . We present a versatile approach to estimate the likelihood of mistakes at the individual level from a noisy dataset by training models over plausible realizations of datasets without label noise. This is supported by a comprehensive empirical study of label noise in clinical prediction tasks. Our results reveal how failure to anticipate mistakes can compromise model reliability and adoption, and demonstrate how we can address these challenges by anticipating and avoiding regretful decisions. Machine learning models are routinely used to support or automate decisions that affect individuals - be it to screen a patient for a mental illness [47], or assess their risk for an adverse treatment response [3]. In such tasks, we train models with labels that reflect noisy observations of the true outcome we wish to predict. In practice, such noise may arise due to measurement error [e.g., 20, 35], human annotation [26], or inherent ambiguity [35]. In all these cases, label noise can have detrimental effects on model performance [10]. Over the past decade, these issues have led to extensive work on learning from noisy datasets [see e.g., 10, 28, 36, 39, 45].
Conditional Conformal Risk Adaptation
Uncertainty quantification is becoming increasingly important in image segmentation, especially for high-stakes applications like medical imaging. While conformal risk control generalizes conformal prediction beyond standard miscoverage to handle various loss functions such as false negative rate, its application to segmentation often yields inadequate conditional risk control: some images experience very high false negative rates while others have negligibly small ones. We develop Conformal Risk Adaptation (CRA), which introduces a new score function for creating adaptive prediction sets that significantly improve conditional risk control for segmentation tasks. We establish a novel theoretical framework that demonstrates a fundamental connection between conformal risk control and conformal prediction through a weighted quantile approach, applicable to any score function. To address the challenge of poorly calibrated probabilities in segmentation models, we introduce a specialized probability calibration framework that enhances the reliability of pixel-wise inclusion estimates. Using these calibrated probabilities, we propose Calibrated Conformal Risk Adaptation (CCRA) and a stratified variant (CCRA-S) that partitions images based on their characteristics and applies group-specific thresholds to further enhance conditional risk control. Our experiments on polyp segmentation demonstrate that all three methods (CRA, CCRA, and CCRA-S) provide valid marginal risk control and deliver more consistent conditional risk control across diverse images compared to standard approaches, offering a principled approach to uncertainty quantification that is particularly valuable for high-stakes and personalized segmentation applications.
Intelligent DoS and DDoS Detection: A Hybrid GRU-NTM Approach to Network Security
Panggabean, Caroline, Venkatachalam, Chandrasekar, Shah, Priyanka, John, Sincy, P, Renuka Devi, Venkatachalam, Shanmugavalli
Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any cur rent or future media. Caroline Panggabean Departement of CSE (AI) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka carolinepgabean@gmail.com Sincy John Departement of CSE (AIM) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka sincyjohn@jainuniversity.ac.in Chandrasekar Venkatachalam Departement of CSE (AI) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka chandrasekar.v@jainuniversity.ac.in Renuka Devi P Departement of CSE (AIML) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka renukadevi.p@jainuniversity.ac.in Priyanka Shah Departement of CSE (AI) JAIN (Deemed - to - be University) Bangalore, Karnataka priyankashah8324@gmail.com Shanmugavalli Venkatachalam Department of CSE KSR College of Engineering Namakkal, Tamil N adu drvshanmugavalli@gmail.com Abstract -- Detecting Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks remains a critical challenge in cybersecurity. This research introduces a hybrid deep learning model combining Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) and a Neural Turing Machine (NTM) for enhanced intrusion detection. Trained on UNSW - NB15 and BoT - IoT datasets, the model employs GRU layers for sequential data processing and an NTM for long - term pattern recognition.
The Role of Machine Learning in Reducing Healthcare Costs: The Impact of Medication Adherence and Preventive Care on Hospitalization Expenses
This study reveals the important role of prevention care and medication adherence in reducing hospitalizations. By using a structured dataset of 1,171 patients, four machine learning models Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting, Random Forest, and Artificial Neural Networks are applied to predict five-year hospitalization risk, with the Gradient Boosting model achieving the highest accuracy of 81.2%. The result demonstrated that patients with high medication adherence and consistent preventive care can reduce 38.3% and 37.7% in hospitalization risk. The finding also suggests that targeted preventive care can have positive Return on Investment (ROI), and therefore ML models can effectively direct personalized interventions and contribute to long-term medical savings.