Intertemporal choices involve making decisions that require weighing the costs in the present against the benefits in the future. One specific type of intertemporal choice is the decision between purchasing an individual item or opting for a bundle that includes that item. Previous research assumes that individuals have accurate expectations of the factors involved in these choices. However, in reality, users' perceptions of these factors are often biased, leading to irrational and suboptimal decision-making. In this work, we specifically focus on two commonly observed biases: projection bias and the reference-point effect. To address these biases, we propose a novel bias-embedded preference model called Probe. The Probe incorporates a weight function to capture users' projection bias and a value function to account for the reference-point effect, and introduce prospect theory from behavioral economics to combine the weight and value functions. This allows us to determine the probability of users selecting the bundle or a single item. We provide a thorough theoretical analysis to demonstrate the impact of projection bias on the design of bundle sales strategies. Through experimental results, we show that the proposed Probe model outperforms existing methods and contributes to a better understanding of users' irrational behaviors in bundle purchases. This investigation can facilitate a deeper comprehension of users' decision-making mechanisms, enable the provision of personalized services, and assist users in making more rational and optimal decisions.

Generalized zero-shot learning models (GZSL) aim to recognize samples from seen or unseen classes using only samples from seen classes as training data. During inference, GZSL methods are often biased towards seen classes due to the visibility of seen class samples during training. Most current GZSL methods try to learn an accurate projection function (from visual space to semantic space) to avoid bias and ensure the effectiveness of GZSL methods. However, during inference, the computation of distance will be important when we classify the projection of any sample into its nearest class since we may learn a biased projection function in the model. In our work, we attempt to learn a parameterized Mahalanobis distance within the framework of VAEGAN (Variational Autoencoder \& Generative Adversarial Networks), where the weight matrix depends on the network's output. In particular, we improved the network structure of VAEGAN to leverage the discriminative models of two branches to separately predict the seen samples and the unseen samples generated by this seen one. We proposed a new loss function with two branches to help us learn the optimized Mahalanobis distance representation. Comprehensive evaluation benchmarks on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art counterparts. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/111hxr.

While deep learning models often achieve strong task performance, their successes are hampered by their inability to disentangle spurious correlations from causative factors, such as when they use protected attributes (e.g., race, gender, etc.) to make decisions. In this work, we tackle the problem of debiasing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in such instances. Building off of existing work on debiasing word embeddings and model interpretability, our Meta Orthogonalization method encourages the CNN representations of different concepts (e.g., gender and class labels) to be orthogonal to one another in activation space while maintaining strong downstream task performance. Through a variety of experiments, we systematically test our method and demonstrate that it significantly mitigates model bias and is competitive against current adversarial debiasing methods.

No stranger to controversy, a Tony Stark reincarnate -- Elon Musk -- came out with an ominous prediction recently. "Forget North Korea, AI will start World War III" read the CNN headline. Elon Musk is not alone in fearing unintended consequences of the race to develop algorithms that we may or may not be able to control. Once a new technology is introduced it can't be uninvented -- Sam Harris points out in his viral TED talk. He argues that it'll be impossible to halt the pace of progress, even if humankind could collectively make such a decision.