proxy group
Top secret Iranian drone site used by IRGC, terror proxies exposed by opposition group
IDF Special Operations veteran Aaron Cohen and executive director of The Lawfare Project Brooke Goldstein react to Israel's'limited' retaliatory strike on Iran on'Hannity.' The People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an exiled Iranian resistance group, provided a report to Fox News Digital presenting evidence of a top-secret unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) site in the Islamic Republic of Iran, north of Qom City in the Ganjine region. According to the report, members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are trained to use "all kinds of drones" at the base, including the Mohajer series, manufactured by Qods Aviation Industry. Employees of Qods Aviation Industry also reportedly use the site to train small groups of Iranian proxy operatives of Hezbollah, as well as members of Iranian proxy groups from Syria, Yemen and Iraq, to use the Mohajer-4 drone platform. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), based on information from the MEK, told Fox News Digital that the site is a proving ground for Mohajer-4, Mohajer-6, and Mohajer-10 drones.
White House promises retaliation against Iran proxy group: 'The first thing you see won't be the last'
White House national security spokesman John Kirby reiterated Wednesday that the U.S. will respond after three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack by an Iran-backed proxy group. President Biden on Tuesday blamed Iran for providing weapons to the militant groups that perpetuated the attack and said he had decided how to respond but did not offer further details. But with no public action in the days since the attack, a reporter asked Kirby whether the White House had missed an opportunity to signal resolve. "I think we signal resolve pretty well. And as I said the other day, we'll respond on our own time, on our own schedule, and we'll do that," Kirby said at the daily White House press briefing.
Balanced Filtering via Non-Disclosive Proxies
Deng, Siqi, Diana, Emily, Kearns, Michael, Roth, Aaron
We study the problem of non-disclosively collecting a sample of data that is balanced with respect to sensitive groups when group membership is unavailable or prohibited from use at collection time. Specifically, our collection mechanism does not reveal significantly more about group membership of any individual sample than can be ascertained from base rates alone. To do this, we adopt a fairness pipeline perspective, in which a learner can use a small set of labeled data to train a proxy function that can later be used for this filtering task. We then associate the range of the proxy function with sampling probabilities; given a new candidate, we classify it using our proxy function, and then select it for our sample with probability proportional to the sampling probability corresponding to its proxy classification. Importantly, we require that the proxy classification itself not reveal significant information about the sensitive group membership of any individual sample (i.e., it should be sufficiently non-disclosive). We show that under modest algorithmic assumptions, we find such a proxy in a sample- and oracle-efficient manner. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our algorithm and analyze generalization properties.
Proxy Fairness
Gupta, Maya, Cotter, Andrew, Fard, Mahdi Milani, Wang, Serena
We consider the problem of improving fairness when one lacks access to a dataset labeled with protected groups, making it difficult to take advantage of strategies that can improve fairness but require protected group labels, either at training or runtime. To address this, we investigate improving fairness metrics for proxy groups, and test whether doing so results in improved fairness for the true sensitive groups. Results on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that such a proxy fairness strategy can work well in practice. However, we caution that the effectiveness likely depends on the choice of fairness metric, as well as how aligned the proxy groups are with the true protected groups in terms of the constrained model parameters.