Disaggregated evaluation across subgroups is critical for assessing the fairness of machine learning models, but its uncritical use can mislead practitioners. We show that equal performance across subgroups is an unreliable measure of fairness when data are representative of the relevant populations but reflective of real-world disparities. Furthermore, when data are not representative due to selection bias, both disaggregated evaluation and alternative approaches based on conditional independence testing may be invalid without explicit assumptions regarding the bias mechanism. We use causal graphical models to predict metric stability across subgroups under different data generating processes. Our framework suggests complementing disaggregated evaluations with explicit causal assumptions and analysis to control for confounding and distribution shift, including conditional independence testing and weighted performance estimation. These findings have broad implications for how practitioners design and interpret model assessments given the ubiquity of disaggregated evaluation.

We propose a framework for hypothesis testing on conditional probability distributions, which we then use to construct conditional two-sample statistical tests. These tests identify the inputs -- called covariates in this context -- where two conditional expectations differ with high probability. Our key idea is to transform confidence bounds of a learning method into a conditional two-sample test, and we instantiate this principle for kernel ridge regression (KRR) and conditional kernel mean embeddings. We generalize existing pointwise-in-time or time-uniform confidence bounds for KRR to previously-inaccessible yet essential cases such as infinite-dimensional outputs with non-trace-class kernels. These bounds enable circumventing the need for independent data in our statistical tests, since they allow online sampling. We also introduce bootstrapping schemes leveraging the parametric form of testing thresholds identified in theory to avoid tuning inaccessible parameters, making our method readily applicable in practice. Such conditional two-sample tests are especially relevant in applications where data arrive sequentially or non-independently, or when output distributions vary with operational parameters. We demonstrate their utility through examples in process monitoring and comparison of dynamical systems. Overall, our results establish a comprehensive foundation for conditional two-sample testing, from theoretical guarantees to practical implementation, and advance the state-of-the-art on the concentration of vector-valued least squares estimation.

This study addresses limitations in the current automated indexing process, which relies on legacy NLP algorithms. We evaluated monolithic multi-label classifiers and binary classifier ensembles to enhance the retrieval of biomedical literature. Results demonstrate the potential of Transformer models to significantly improve PT tagging accuracy, paving the way for scalable, efficient biomedical indexing. Keywords: MEDLINE, MeSH Publication Types, Pre-trained Foundation Models, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning 1. Introduction The MEDLINE indexed subset of the National Library of Medicine' s ( NLM ' s) PubMed service is a cornerstone of biomedical knowledge, housing millions of citations from journals worldwide. Its significance lies not only in its vast scope but also in its ability to organize and provide efficient access to this wealth of information.

We present TransClean, a method for detecting false positive predictions of entity matching algorithms under real-world conditions characterized by large-scale, noisy, and unlabeled multi-source datasets that undergo distributional shifts. TransClean is explicitly designed to operate with multiple data sources in an efficient, robust and fast manner while accounting for edge cases and requiring limited manual labeling. TransClean leverages the Transitive Consistency of a matching, a measure of the consistency of a pairwise matching model f_theta on the matching it produces G_f_theta, based both on its predictions on directly evaluated record pairs and its predictions on implied record pairs. TransClean iteratively modifies a matching through gradually removing false positive matches while removing as few true positive matches as possible. In each of these steps, the estimation of the Transitive Consistency is exclusively done through model evaluations and produces quantities that can be used as proxies of the amounts of true and false positives in the matching while not requiring any manual labeling, producing an estimate of the quality of the matching and indicating which record groups are likely to contain false positives. In our experiments, we compare combining TransClean with a naively trained pairwise matching model (DistilBERT) and with a state-of-the-art end-to-end matching method (CLER) and illustrate the flexibility of TransClean in being able to detect most of the false positives of either setup across a variety of datasets. Our experiments show that TransClean induces an average +24.42 F1 score improvement for entity matching in a multi-source setting when compared to traditional pair-wise matching algorithms.

Unintentional or accidental falls are one of the significant health issues in senior persons. The population of senior persons is increasing steadily. So, there is a need for an automated fall detection monitoring system. This paper introduces a vision-based fall detection system using a pre-trained 3D CNN. Unlike 2D CNN, 3D CNN extracts not only spatial but also temporal features. The proposed model leverages the original learned weights of a 3D CNN model pre-trained on the Sports1M dataset to extract the spatio-temporal features. Only the SVM classifier was trained, which saves the time required to train the 3D CNN. Stratified shuffle five split cross-validation has been used to split the dataset into training and testing data. Extracted features from the proposed 3D CNN model were fed to an SVM classifier to classify the activity as fall or ADL. Two datasets, GMDCSA and CAUCAFall, were utilized to conduct the experiment. The source code for this work can be accessed via the following link: https://github.com/ekramalam/HFD_3DCNN.

Pathologists comprehensive evaluation of donor liver biopsies provides crucial information for accepting or discarding potential grafts. However, rapidly and accurately obtaining these assessments intraoperatively poses a significant challenge for pathologists. Features in donor liver biopsies, such as portal tract fibrosis, total steatosis, macrovesicular steatosis, and hepatocellular ballooning are correlated with transplant outcomes, yet quantifying these indicators suffers from substantial inter- and intra-observer variability. To address this, we introduce DLiPath, the first benchmark for comprehensive donor liver assessment based on a histopathology image dataset. We collected and publicly released 636 whole slide images from 304 donor liver patients at the Department of Pathology, the Third Xiangya Hospital, with expert annotations for key pathological features (including cholestasis, portal tract fibrosis, portal inflammation, total steatosis, macrovesicular steatosis, and hepatocellular ballooning). We selected nine state-of-the-art multiple-instance learning (MIL) models based on the DLiPath dataset as baselines for extensive comparative analysis. The experimental results demonstrate that several MIL models achieve high accuracy across donor liver assessment indicators on DLiPath, charting a clear course for future automated and intelligent donor liver assessment research. Data and code are available at https://github.com/panliangrui/ACM_MM_2025.

As financial institutions increasingly rely on machine learning models to automate lending decisions, concerns about algorithmic fairness have risen. This paper explores the tradeoff between enforcing fairness constraints (such as demographic parity or equal opportunity) and maximizing lender profitability. Through simulations on synthetic data that reflects real-world lending patterns, we quantify how different fairness interventions impact profit margins and default rates. Our results demonstrate that equal opportunity constraints typically impose lower profit costs than demographic parity, but surprisingly, removing protected attributes from the model (fairness through unawareness) outperforms explicit fairness interventions in both fairness and profitability metrics. We further identify the specific economic conditions under which fair lending becomes profitable and analyze the feature-specific drivers of unfairness. These findings offer practical guidance for designing lending algorithms that balance ethical considerations with business objectives.

Human learning and conceptual representation is grounded in sensorimotor experience, in contrast to state-of-the-art foundation models. In this paper, we investigate how well such large-scale models, trained on vast quantities of data, represent the semantic feature norms of concrete object concepts, e.g. a ROSE is red, smells sweet, and is a flower. More specifically, we use probing tasks to test which properties of objects these models are aware of. We evaluate image encoders trained on image data alone, as well as multimodally-trained image encoders and language-only models, on predicting an extended denser version of the classic McRae norms and the newer Binder dataset of attribute ratings. We find that multimodal image encoders slightly outperform language-only approaches, and that image-only encoders perform comparably to the language models, even on non-visual attributes that are classified as "encyclopedic" or "function". These results offer new insights into what can be learned from pure unimodal learning, and the complementarity of the modalities.

Legal decisions are increasingly evaluated for fairness, consistency, and bias using machine learning (ML) techniques. In high-stakes domains like refugee adjudication, such methods are often applied to detect disparities in outcomes. Yet it remains unclear whether statistical methods can meaningfully assess fairness in legal contexts shaped by discretion, normative complexity, and limited ground truth. In this paper, we empirically evaluate three common ML approaches (feature-based analysis, semantic clustering, and predictive modeling) on a large, real-world dataset of 59,000+ Canadian refugee decisions (AsyLex). Our experiments show that these methods produce divergent and sometimes contradictory signals, that predictive modeling often depends on contextual and procedural features rather than legal features, and that semantic clustering fails to capture substantive legal reasoning. We show limitations of statistical fairness evaluation, challenge the assumption that statistical regularity equates to fairness, and argue that current computational approaches fall short of evaluating fairness in legally discretionary domains. We argue that evaluating fairness in law requires methods grounded not only in data, but in legal reasoning and institutional context.

As hypothesis generation becomes increasingly automated, a new bottleneck has emerged: hypothesis assessment. Modern systems can surface thousands of statistical relationships-correlations, trends, causal links-but offer little guidance on which ones are novel, non-trivial, or worthy of expert attention. In this work, we study the complementary problem to hypothesis generation: automatic hypothesis assessment. Specifically, we ask: given a large set of statistical relationships, can we automatically assess which ones are novel and worth further exploration? We focus on correlations as they are a common entry point in exploratory data analysis that often serve as the basis for forming deeper scientific or causal hypotheses. To support automatic assessment, we propose to leverage the vast knowledge encoded in LLMs' weights to derive a prior distribution over the correlation value of a variable pair. If an LLM's prior expects the correlation value observed, then such correlation is not surprising, and vice versa. We propose the Logit-based Calibrated Prior, an LLM-elicited correlation prior that transforms the model's raw output logits into a calibrated, continuous predictive distribution over correlation values. We evaluate the prior on a benchmark of 2,096 real-world variable pairs and it achieves a sign accuracy of 78.8%, a mean absolute error of 0.26, and 95% credible interval coverage of 89.2% in predicting Pearson correlation coefficient. It also outperforms a fine-tuned RoBERTa classifier in binary correlation prediction and achieves higher precision@K in hypothesis ranking. We further show that the prior generalizes to correlations not seen during LLM pretraining, reflecting context-sensitive reasoning rather than memorization.