Technology
Retiring Adult: New Datasets for Fair Machine Learning
Although the fairness community has recognized the importance of data, re-searchers in the area primarily rely on UCIAdult when it comes to tabular data. Derived from a 1994 USCensus survey, this dataset has appeared in hundreds of research papers where it served as the basis for the development and comparison of many algorithmic fairness interventions. We reconstruct a superset of the UCI Adult data from available USCensus sources and reveal idiosyncrasies of the UCIAdult dataset that limit its external validity. Our primary contribution is asuite of new datasets derived from USCensus surveys that extend the existing data ecosystem for research on fair machine learning. We create prediction tasks relating to income, employment, health, transportation, and housing. The data span multiple years and all states of the United States, allowing researchers to studytemporal shift and geographic variation. We highlight a broad initial sweep of new empirical insights relating to trade-offs between fairness criteria, performance of algorithmic interventions, and the role of distribution shift based on our new datasets. Our findings inform ongoing debates, challenge some existing narratives, and point to future research directions.
The Online Civil War About 'Michael' Is a Battle Over Truth
Fans want to reclaim the music and myth of Michael Jackson in the new biopic while critics call for accountability. Still from, which opened April 24. Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches? If so, --a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was--intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue. The film's release has sparked a familiar but newly intensified civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.
With A.I., Anyone Can Be an Influencer
With A.I., Anyone Can Be an Influencer TikTok and Instagram made it easy to monetize the physical self. Now the social-media-savvy can use A.I. to play with their identity, or overhaul it entirely. A few months ago, a forty-five-year-old homemaker living in Georgia, whom I'll call Robin, started playing around with an A.I. image generator. Growing up, Robin had loved reading; she dabbled in writing, too, but after her first child was born, the habit faded. A.I. offered something different--a kind of world-building that allowed her to project herself into places and situations she'd never inhabited.
A/BTesting for Recommender Systems in a Two-sided Marketplace
Two-sided marketplaces are standard business models of many online platforms (e.g., Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn), wherein the platforms have consumers, buyers or content viewers on one side and producers, sellers or content-creators on the other. Consumer side measurement of the impact of a treatment variant can be done via simple online A/B testing. Producer side measurement is more challenging because the producer experience depends on the treatment assignment of the consumers. Existing approaches for producer side measurement are either based on graph cluster-based randomization or on certain treatment propagation assumptions. The former approach results in low-powered experiments as the producer-consumer network density increases and the latter approach lacks a strict notion of error control. In this paper, we propose (i) a quantification of the quality of a producer side experiment design, and (ii) a new experiment design mechanism that generates high-quality experiments based on this quantification.
UniCoRn_with_appendix
Two-sided marketplaces are standard business models of many online platforms (e.g., Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn), wherein the platforms have consumers, buyers or content viewers on one side and producers, sellers or content-creators on the other. Consumer side measurement of the impact of a treatment variant can be done via simple online A/B testing. Producer side measurement is more challenging because the producer experience depends on the treatment assignment of the consumers. Existing approaches for producer side measurement are either based on graph cluster-based randomization or on certain treatment propagation assumptions. The former approach results in low-powered experiments as the producer-consumer network density increases and the latter approach lacks a strict notion of error control. In this paper, we propose (i) a quantification of the quality of a producer side experiment design, and (ii) a new experiment design mechanism that generates high-quality experiments based on this quantification.
Scaling Gaussian Processes with Derivative Information Using Variational Inference
Gaussian processes with derivative information are useful in many settings where derivative information is available, including numerous Bayesian optimization and regression tasks that arise in the natural sciences. Incorporating derivative observations, however, comes with a dominating O(N3D3) computational cost when training on N points in D input dimensions. This is intractable for even moderately sized problems. While recent work has addressed this intractability in the low-Dsetting, the high-N, high-Dsetting is still unexplored and of great value, particularly as machine learning problems increasingly become high dimensional. In this paper, we introduce methods to achieve fully scalable Gaussian process regression with derivatives using variational inference. Analogous to the use of inducing values to sparsify the labels of a training set, we introduce the concept of inducing directional derivatives to sparsify the partial derivative information of a training set. This enables us to construct a variational posterior that incorporates derivative information but whose size depends neither on the full dataset size N nor the full dimensionality D. We demonstrate the full scalability of our approach on a variety of tasks, ranging from a high dimensional stellarator fusion regression task to training graph convolutional neural networks on Pubmed using Bayesian optimization. Surprisingly, we find that our approach can improve regression performance even in settings where only label data is available.
Detection Framework for Inference Stage Backdoor Defenses
Backdoor attacks involve inserting poisoned samples during training, resulting in a model containing a hidden backdoor that can trigger specific behaviors without impacting performance on normal samples. These attacks are challenging to detect, as the backdoored model appears normal until activated by the backdoor trigger, rendering them particularly stealthy. In this study, we devise a unified inferencestage detection framework to defend against backdoor attacks. We first rigorously formulate the inference-stage backdoor detection problem, encompassing various existing methods, and discuss several challenges and limitations. We then propose a framework with provable guarantees on the false positive rate or the probability of misclassifying a clean sample. Further, we derive the most powerful detection rule to maximize the detection power, namely the rate of accurately identifying a backdoor sample, given a false positive rate under classical learning scenarios.
ParK: Sound and Efficient Kernel Ridge Regression by Feature Space Partitions
We introduce ParK, a new large-scale solver for kernel ridge regression. Our approach combines partitioning with random projections and iterative optimization to reduce space and time complexity while provably maintaining the same statistical accuracy. In particular, constructing suitable partitions directly in the feature space rather than in the input space, we promote orthogonality between the local estimators, thus ensuring that key quantities such as local effective dimension and bias remain under control. We characterize the statistical-computational tradeoff of our model, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by numerical experiments on large-scale datasets.