We present a method for quantitative, in-depth analyses of fairness issues in AI systems with an application to credit scoring. To this aim we use BRIO, a tool for the evaluation of AI systems with respect to social unfairness and, more in general, ethically undesirable behaviours. It features a model-agnostic bias detection module, presented in \cite{DBLP:conf/beware/CoragliaDGGPPQ23}, to which a full-fledged unfairness risk evaluation module is added. As a case study, we focus on the context of credit scoring, analysing the UCI German Credit Dataset \cite{misc_statlog_(german_credit_data)_144}. We apply the BRIO fairness metrics to several, socially sensitive attributes featured in the German Credit Dataset, quantifying fairness across various demographic segments, with the aim of identifying potential sources of bias and discrimination in a credit scoring model. We conclude by combining our results with a revenue analysis.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) has gained significant attention due to its several application fields, such as mental health, education, and human-computer interaction. However, the accuracy of SER systems is hindered by high-dimensional feature sets that may contain irrelevant and redundant information. To overcome this challenge, this study proposes an iterative feature boosting approach for SER that emphasizes feature relevance and explainability to enhance machine learning model performance. Our approach involves meticulous feature selection and analysis to build efficient SER systems. In addressing our main problem through model explainability, we employ a feature evaluation loop with Shapley values to iteratively refine feature sets. This process strikes a balance between model performance and transparency, which enables a comprehensive understanding of the model's predictions. The proposed approach offers several advantages, including the identification and removal of irrelevant and redundant features, leading to a more effective model. Additionally, it promotes explainability, facilitating comprehension of the model's predictions and the identification of crucial features for emotion determination. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on the SER benchmarks of the Toronto emotional speech set (TESS), Berlin Database of Emotional Speech (EMO-DB), Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), and Surrey Audio-Visual Expressed Emotion (SAVEE) datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate model explainability into an SER framework. The source code of this paper is publicly available via this https://github.com/alaaNfissi/Unveiling-Hidden-Factors-Explainable-AI-for-Feature-Boosting-in-Speech-Emotion-Recognition.

Generations from large language models (LLMs) can be improved by sampling and scoring multiple solutions to select a final answer. Current "sample and select" methods such as self-consistency (SC) rely on majority voting to score answers. However, when tasks have many distinct and valid answers, selection by voting requires a large number of samples. This makes SC prohibitively expensive for interactive tasks that involve generating multiple actions (answers) sequentially. After establishing that majority voting fails to provide consistent gains on such tasks, we demonstrate how to increase success rates by softening the scoring criterion. We introduce Soft Self-Consistency (SOFT-SC), which replaces SC's discontinuous scoring with a continuous score computed from model likelihoods, allowing for selection even when actions are sparsely distributed. SOFT-SC improves both performance and efficiency on long-horizon interactive tasks, requiring half as many samples as SC for comparable or better performance. For a fixed number of samples, SOFT-SC leads to a 1.3% increase over SC in absolute success rate on writing bash programs, a 6.6% increase on online shopping (WebShop), and a 4.7% increase for an interactive household game (ALFWorld). Finally, we show that SOFT-SC can be applied to both open-source and black-box models.

Data subset selection aims to find a smaller yet informative subset of a large dataset that can approximate the full-dataset training, addressing challenges associated with training neural networks on large-scale datasets. However, existing methods tend to specialize in either high or low selection ratio regimes, lacking a universal approach that consistently achieves competitive performance across a broad range of selection ratios. We introduce a universal and efficient data subset selection method, Best Window Selection (BWS), by proposing a method to choose the best window subset from samples ordered based on their difficulty scores. This approach offers flexibility by allowing the choice of window intervals that span from easy to difficult samples. Furthermore, we provide an efficient mechanism for selecting the best window subset by evaluating its quality using kernel ridge regression. Our experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of BWS compared to other baselines across a broad range of selection ratios over datasets, including CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet, and the scenarios involving training from random initialization or fine-tuning of pre-trained models.

The size of large language models (LLMs) has scaled dramatically in recent years and their computational and data requirements have surged correspondingly. State-of-the-art language models, even at relatively smaller sizes, typically require training on at least a trillion tokens. This rapid advancement has eclipsed the growth of open-source datasets available for large-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce Zyda (Zyphra Dataset), a dataset under a permissive license comprising 1.3 trillion tokens, assembled by integrating several major respected open-source datasets into a single, high-quality corpus. We apply rigorous filtering and deduplication processes, both within and across datasets, to maintain and enhance the quality derived from the original datasets. Our evaluations show that Zyda not only competes favorably with other open datasets like Dolma, FineWeb, and RefinedWeb, but also substantially improves the performance of comparable models from the Pythia suite. Our rigorous data processing methods significantly enhance Zyda's effectiveness, outperforming even the best of its constituent datasets when used independently.

We present a novel preprocessing and prediction pipeline for the classification of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that takes advantage of the information rich complex valued k-Space. Using a publicly available MRI raw dataset with 312 subject and a total of 9508 slices, we show the advantage of utilizing the k-Space for better prostate cancer likelihood estimation in comparison to just using the magnitudinal information in the image domain, with an AUROC of $86.1\%\pm1.8\%$. Additionally, by using high undersampling rates and a simple principal component analysis (PCA) for coil compression, we reduce the time needed for reconstruction by avoiding the time intensive GRAPPA reconstruction algorithm. By using digital undersampling for our experiments, we show that scanning and reconstruction time could be reduced. Even with an undersampling factor of 16, our approach achieves meaningful results, with an AUROC of $71.4\%\pm2.9\%$, using the PCA coil combination and taking into account the k-Space information. With this study, we were able to show the feasibility of preserving phase and k-Space information, with consistent results. Besides preserving valuable information for further diagnostics, this approach can work without the time intensive ADC and reconstruction calculations, greatly reducing the post processing, as well as potential scanning time, increasing patient comfort and allowing a close to real-time prediction.

We present a method to integrate real-time out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for neural network trajectory predictors, and to adapt the control strategy of a robot (e.g., a self-driving car or drone) to preserve safety while operating in OOD regimes. Specifically, we use a neural network ensemble to predict the trajectory for a dynamic obstacle (such as a pedestrian), and use the maximum singular value of the empirical covariance among the ensemble as a signal for OOD detection. We calibrate this signal with a small fraction of held-out training data using the methodology of conformal prediction, to derive an OOD detector with probabilistic guarantees on the false-positive rate of the detector, given a user-specified confidence level. During in-distribution operation, we use an MPC controller to avoid collisions with the obstacle based on the trajectory predicted by the neural network ensemble. When OOD conditions are detected, we switch to a reachability-based controller to guarantee safety under the worst-case actions of the obstacle. We verify our method in extensive autonomous driving simulations in a pedestrian crossing scenario, showing that our OOD detector obtains the desired accuracy rate within a theoretically-predicted range. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with real pedestrian data. We show improved safety and less conservatism in comparison with two state-of-the-art methods that also use conformal prediction, but without OOD adaptation.

The representation of feature space is a crucial environment where data points get vectorized and embedded for upcoming modeling. Thus the efficacy of machine learning (ML) algorithms is closely related to the quality of feature engineering. As one of the most important techniques, feature generation transforms raw data into an optimized feature space conducive to model training and further refines the space. Despite the advancements in automated feature engineering and feature generation, current methodologies often suffer from three fundamental issues: lack of explainability, limited applicability, and inflexible strategy. These shortcomings frequently hinder and limit the deployment of ML models across varied scenarios. Our research introduces a novel approach adopting large language models (LLMs) and feature-generating prompts to address these challenges. We propose a dynamic and adaptive feature generation method that enhances the interpretability of the feature generation process. Our approach broadens the applicability across various data types and tasks and draws advantages over strategic flexibility. A broad range of experiments showcases that our approach is significantly superior to existing methods.

This paper presents a comparative study of sampling methods within the FedHome framework, designed for personalized in-home health monitoring. FedHome leverages federated learning (FL) and generative convolutional autoencoders (GCAE) to train models on decentralized edge devices while prioritizing data privacy. A notable challenge in this domain is the class imbalance in health data, where critical events such as falls are underrepresented, adversely affecting model performance. To address this, the research evaluates six oversampling techniques using Stratified K-fold cross-validation: SMOTE, Borderline-SMOTE, Random OverSampler, SMOTE-Tomek, SVM-SMOTE, and SMOTE-ENN. These methods are tested on FedHome's public implementation over 200 training rounds with and without stratified K-fold cross-validation. The findings indicate that SMOTE-ENN achieves the most consistent test accuracy, with a standard deviation range of 0.0167-0.0176, demonstrating stable performance compared to other samplers. In contrast, SMOTE and SVM-SMOTE exhibit higher variability in performance, as reflected by their wider standard deviation ranges of 0.0157-0.0180 and 0.0155-0.0180, respectively. Similarly, the Random OverSampler method shows a significant deviation range of 0.0155-0.0176. SMOTE-Tomek, with a deviation range of 0.0160-0.0175, also shows greater stability but not as much as SMOTE-ENN. This finding highlights the potential of SMOTE-ENN to enhance the reliability and accuracy of personalized health monitoring systems within the FedHome framework.

In the modern era, mobile phones have become ubiquitous, and Short Message Service (SMS) has grown to become a multi-million-dollar service due to the widespread adoption of mobile devices and the millions of people who use SMS daily. However, SMS spam has also become a pervasive problem that endangers users' privacy and security through phishing and fraud. Despite numerous spam filtering techniques, there is still a need for a more effective solution to address this problem [1]. This research addresses the pervasive issue of SMS spam, which poses threats to users' privacy and security. Despite existing spam filtering techniques, the high false-positive rate persists as a challenge. The study introduces a novel approach utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning models, particularly BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), for SMS spam detection and classification. Data preprocessing techniques, such as stop word removal and tokenization, are applied, along with feature extraction using BERT. Machine learning models, including SVM, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest, are integrated with BERT for differentiating spam from ham messages. Evaluation results revealed that the Na\"ive Bayes classifier + BERT model achieves the highest accuracy at 97.31% with the fastest execution time of 0.3 seconds on the test dataset. This approach demonstrates a notable enhancement in spam detection efficiency and a low false-positive rate. The developed model presents a valuable solution to combat SMS spam, ensuring faster and more accurate detection. This model not only safeguards users' privacy but also assists network providers in effectively identifying and blocking SMS spam messages.