subpopulation
REMI: Reconstructing Episodic Memory During Internally Driven Path Planning
Grid cells fire in triangular grid patterns, while place cells fire at specific locations and respond to contextual cues. How do these interacting systems support not only spatial encoding but also internally driven path planning, such as navigating to locations recalled from cues? Here, we propose a system-level theory of MEC-HC wiring that explains how grid and place cell patterns could be connected to enable cue-triggered goal retrieval, path planning, and reconstruction of sensory experience along planned routes. We suggest that place cells autoassociate sensory inputs with grid cell patterns, allowing sensory cues to trigger recall of goal-location grid patterns. We show analytically that grid-based planning permits shortcuts through unvisited locations and generalizes local transitions to long-range paths. During planning, intermediate grid states trigger place cell pattern completion, reconstructing sensory experiences along the route. Using a single-layer RNN modeling the HC-MEC loop with a planning subnetwork, we demonstrate these effects in both biologically grounded navigation simulations using RatatouGym and visually realistic navigation tasks using Habitat Sim. Codes for experiments, simulations, and vision encoder are available at 1,2,3.
SureMap: Simultaneous mean estimation for single-task and multi-task disaggregated evaluation
Disaggregated evaluation--estimation of performance of a machine learning model on different subpopulations--is a core task when assessing performance and group-fairness of AI systems.A key challenge is that evaluation data is scarce, and subpopulations arising from intersections of attributes (e.g., race, sex, age) are often tiny.Today, it is common for multiple clients to procure the same AI model from a model developer, and the task of disaggregated evaluation is faced by each customer individually. This gives rise to what we call the, wherein multiple clients seek to conduct a disaggregated evaluation of a given model in their own data setting (task).
When Worlds Collide: Integrating Different Counterfactual Assumptions in Fairness
Machine learning is now being used to make crucial decisions about people's lives. For nearly all of these decisions there is a risk that individuals of a certain race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other subpopulation are unfairly discriminated against. Our recent method has demonstrated how to use techniques from counterfactual inference to make predictions fair across different subpopulations. This method requires that one provides the causal model that generated the data at hand. In general, validating all causal implications of the model is not possible without further assumptions.