The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/AndyShih12/HyperSPN. To examine the merits of HyperSPNs as discussed in Section 3, we construct a hand-crafted dataset to test the three types of models described in Figure 4: SPN-Large, SPN-Small, and HyperSPN. The hand-crafted dataset is procedurally generated with 256 binary variables and 10000 instances, broken into train/valid/test splits at 70/10/20%. The generation procedure is designed such that the correlation between variable i and j is dependent on the path length between leaves i and j of a complete binary tree over the 256 variables. The exact details can be found in our code.

We study fair machine learning (ML) under predictive uncertainty to enable reliable and trustworthy decision-making. The seminal work of "equalized coverage" proposed an uncertainty-aware fairness notion. However, it does not guarantee equal coverage rates across more fine-grained groups (e.g., low-income females) conditioning on the true label and is biased in the assessment of uncertainty. To tackle these limitations, we propose a new uncertainty-aware fairness - Equal Opportunity of Coverage (EOC) - that aims to achieve two properties: (1) coverage rates for different groups with similar outcomes are close, and (2) the coverage rate for the entire population remains at a predetermined level. Further, the prediction intervals should be narrow to be informative. We propose Binned Fair Quantile Regression (BFQR), a distribution-free post-processing method to improve EOC with reasonable width for any trained ML models. It first calibrates a hold-out set to bound deviation from EOC, then leverages conformal prediction to maintain EOC on a test set, meanwhile optimizing prediction interval width. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving EOC.

Evaluating the performance of machine learning models on diverse and underrepresented subgroups is essential for ensuring fairness and reliability in real-world applications. However, accurately assessing model performance becomes challenging due to two main issues: (1) a scarcity of test data, especially for small subgroups, and (2) possible distributional shifts in the model's deployment setting, which may not align with the available test data. In this work, we introduce 3STesting, a deep generative modeling framework to facilitate model evaluation by generating synthetic test sets for small subgroups and simulating distributional shifts. Our experiments demonstrate that 3STesting outperforms traditional baselines--including real test data alone--in estimating model performance on minority subgroups and under plausible distributional shifts. In addition, 3S offers intervals around its performance estimates, exhibiting superior coverage of the ground truth compared to existing approaches. Overall, these results raise the question of whether we need a paradigm shift away from limited real test data towards synthetic test data.

Federated learning (FL) is an effective machine learning paradigm where multiple clients can train models based on heterogeneous data in a decentralized manner without accessing their private data. However, existing FL systems undergo performance deterioration due to feature-level test-time shifts, which are well investigated in centralized settings but rarely studied in FL. The common non-IID issue in FL usually refers to inter-client heterogeneity during training phase, while the test-time shift refers to the intra-client heterogeneity during test phase. Although the former is always deemed to be notorious for FL, there is still a wealth of useful information delivered by heterogeneous data sources, which may potentially help alleviate the latter issue. To explore the possibility of using inter-client heterogeneity in handling intra-client heterogeneity, we firstly propose a contrastive learning-based FL framework, namely FedICON, to capture invariant knowledge among heterogeneous clients and consistently tune the model to adapt to test data. In FedICON, each client performs sample-wise supervised contrastive learning during the local training phase, which enhances sample-wise invariance encoding ability. Through global aggregation, the invariance extraction ability can be mutually boosted among inter-client heterogeneity. During the test phase, our test-time adaptation procedure leverages unsupervised contrastive learning to guide the model to smoothly generalize to test data under intra-client heterogeneity. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed FedICON in taming heterogeneity to handle test-time shift problems.

The code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/AndyShih12/HyperSPN. To examine the merits of HyperSPNs as discussed in Section 3, we construct a hand-crafted dataset to test the three types of models described in Figure 4: SPN-Large, SPN-Small, and HyperSPN. The hand-crafted dataset is procedurally generated with 256 binary variables and 10000 instances, broken into train/valid/test splits at 70/10/20%. The generation procedure is designed such that the correlation between variable i and j is dependent on the path length between leaves i and j of a complete binary tree over the 256 variables. The exact details can be found in our code.

Adapting to dynamic data distributions is a practical yet challenging task.