Auditing fairness of decision-makers is now in high demand. To respond to this social demand, several fairness auditing tools have been developed. The focus of this study is to raise an awareness of the risk of malicious decision-makers who fake fairness by abusing the auditing tools and thereby deceiving the social co…
This study improves audit sampling by using sequential procedures with statistical guarantees.
problem Improving audit efficiency and reliability with statistical methods.
method Formulated as a sequential testing problem, defining null and alternative hypotheses, stopping and decision rules, and exact boundary conditions.
result Exact design yields ex ante control of decision error probabilities, and simulation-based implementation approximates this design.
New method protects whistleblowers from retaliation by ensuring their reports remain private.
problem Whistleblowers face retaliation, and current protections are insufficient.
method Formalizes protection against strong-adversary threat model as per-report (0,δ)-differential privacy, and provides a generic mechanism to reduce private auditing to private continual counting. result Demonstrates a reduction in selection error and improved utility over randomized response.
DeFi TrustBoost uses blockchain and AI to assess small business loans.
problem Assessing small business loans from low-wealth households.
method Combines blockchain and Explainable AI to ensure confidentiality, compliance, and security.
result Tamper-proof auditing and on-chain/off-chain data storage for financial organizations.
The paper shows how to audit fairness in decisions with hidden risk factors.
problem Estimating fairness in decisions influenced by hidden, unobservable risk factors.
method Derives unbiased estimates of risk using historical data and audits existing decision-making systems.
result One can compute meaningful bounds on treatment rates for high-risk individuals, even with hidden confounders.
Peer-induced fairness framework audits algorithmic fairness in AI applications.
problem Current auditing methods lack robustness and fail to distinguish between algorithmic discrimination and subject limitations.
method Combines counterfactual fairness and peer comparison strategy for a reliable auditing tool.
result Demonstrates significant unfairness in micro-firms compared to non-micro firms, highlighting the framework's potential.
Evaluating AI investment strategies
problem Auditing a black-box algorithmic decision-maker
method Exact decomposition of cumulative regret
result Cumulative regret equals sum of per-period covariances
ClauseLens uses reinforcement learning to price reinsurance treaties transparently and auditably.
problem Opaque and difficult-to-audit reinsurance treaty pricing practices.
method ClauseLens models treaty pricing as a Risk-Aware Constrained Markov Decision Process (RA-CMDP), incorporating legal clauses and generating interpretable explanations.
result ClauseLens reduces solvency violations and improves tail-risk performance, achieving 88.2% accuracy in clause-grounded explanations.
RESHAPE explains financial statement anomalies by aggregating explanations from AENNs.
problem Detecting and explaining accounting anomalies in financial audits is challenging.
method Proposes RESHAPE to explain model output on an aggregated attribute-level.
result RESHAPE provides more comprehensible explanations compared to existing methods.
Algorithm reduces audit costs by identifying best service configurations from biased textual evidence.
problem Designing service systems from textual evidence requires accurate selection despite biased automated scoring.
method Developed PP-LUCB algorithm combining LLM scores and selective audits to minimize costs.
result Correctly identified the best model in 40/40 trials with 90% cost reduction.
Mathematical model audits social media algorithms to prevent bias.
problem Algorithmic filtering can bias users' decisions and societal norms.
method Formalized mathematical framework for auditing social media algorithms.
result Data-driven statistical auditing procedure to regulate algorithmic bias.
AI-driven framework improves enterprise financial audits and risk identification.
problem Manual auditing is inefficient and limited by data complexity and evolving fraud tactics.
method Machine learning algorithms (SVM, RF, KNN) applied to a dataset of audit project counts, violations, and fraud instances.
result Random Forest achieves best performance with F1-score of 0.9012, identifying fraud and compliance anomalies.
LLM trading agents show risk feedback can improve alignment without fine-tuning.
problem Aligning LLM trading agents with financial risk.
method TradeArena testbed, risk reports, execution simulation, memory replay.
result Risk feedback can improve alignment without fine-tuning, but not universally.
Paper tackles transparency and auditability of machine learning in credit scoring.
problem Missed potential in using modern machine learning for credit scoring due to lack of transparency.
method Develops a framework for making black box machine learning models transparent, auditable, and explainable.
result Comparable interpretability can be achieved with machine learning while maintaining predictive power.
Framework uses hindsight regret to audit marketing budget allocations.
problem Lack of principled way to assess strategic budget allocations.
method Hindsight regret framework based on constraint-faithful benchmark.
result Identifies practical trade-off between allocation flexibility and detectability.
AURA: Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Refinement for LLM-as-a-Judge Auditing
problem Auditing LLM-as-a-Judge decisions
method Adaptive uncertainty-aware refinement
result Human-consistent signal learning and evidence propagation
Audit shows risk claims from distributional reinforcement learning agents are often false.
problem Evaluating the risk claims made by distributional reinforcement learning agents.
method Combines a decision-relevant screening metric, ground truth from Monte Carlo, and statistical methods to audit risk claims.
result 40-95% of the strongest risk claims are refuted, indicating the learned risk reflects a training artifact rather than environment stochasticity.
Deep learning models have been criticized for their lack of easy interpretation, which undermines confidence in their use for important applications. Nevertheless, they are consistently utilized in many applications, consequential to humans' lives, mostly because of their better performance. Therefore, there is a great…
Nowadays, the use of machine learning models is becoming a utility in many applications. Companies deliver pre-trained models encapsulated as application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers combine with third party components and their own models and data to create complex data products to solve specific prob…
Study examines auditing fairness in evolving models, identifying strategic updates that preserve audit properties.
problem Auditing fairness in machine learning models that adapt to changing environments.
method Characterizes strategic updates that preserve audit properties, proposes a generic PAC auditing framework.
result Establishes distribution-free auditing bounds for statistical parity using the SP dimension.
OpenAlpha validates decentralized capital strategies using game theory and market aggregation.
problem Decentralized capital management's lack of trust-minimised, adaptive deployment.
method Game-theoretic validation, adversarial auditing, market-based belief aggregation.
result Confidence scores from validation phases inform capital allocation rules.
We investigated publicly reported security breaches of internal controls in corporate systems to determine whether SOX assessments are information bearing with respect to breaches which can lead to materially significant losses and misstatements. SOX Section 404 adverse decisions on effectiveness of controls occurred i…
Neural networks help auditors efficiently assess financial statements by learning underlying data patterns.
problem Efficiently auditing large volumes of financial statements and journal entries.
method Vector Quantised-Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) neural networks.
result VQ-VAE neural networks can learn a quantized representation of accounting data, uncovering latent factors and providing a representative audit sample.
Adaptive auditing improves AI robustness testing with anytime-valid guarantees.
problem Cost and time of annotation limit rigorous AI failure mode characterization.
method Introduces hypothesis testing framework for adaptive audits using SAVI.
result Proves anytime-valid type-I error control and robustness certification.
New methods target conditional demographic parity using optimal transport distances.
problem Auditing and enforcing conditional demographic parity (CDP) in models with complex conditioning variables.
method Developed novel measures of conditional demographic disparity (CDD) based on optimal transport distances and regularization-based approaches.
result Validated methods airbit{} and airlp{} effectively target CDP in real-world datasets with continuous model outputs.
In Random Forests, proximity distances are a metric representation of data into decision space. By observing how changes in input map to the movement of instances in this space we are able to determine the independent contribution of each feature to the decision-making process. For binary feature vectors, this process …
Study reveals AI skin cancer classifiers underperform for darker skin phototypes, advocating for fairness auditing.
problem AI bias in dermatology, particularly for darker skin phototypes.
method Predictive Representativity (PR) framework, evaluating classifiers on HAM10000 and BOSQUE Test sets.
result Substantial performance disparities by skin phototype, highlighting AI bias.
Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is goodhart-resistant.
problem Intrinsic motivation for agents to improve their world models by compressing experience.
method Rewarding agents for the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss.
result Cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, preventing infinite reward push while true audit performance stagnates.
New auditors assess f-DP privacy with adaptive sampling, avoiding large sample sizes.
problem Empirical auditing of f-DP privacy with adaptive sampling. method Shift focus to f-DP, develop adaptive auditors for whitebox and blackbox settings. result Adaptive auditors detect f-DP violations across the privacy spectrum with statistical guarantees. Big data transforms accounting and auditing, enhancing insights but posing challenges.
problem Challenges in data privacy and security with increased data sources.
method Utilizing AI and machine learning for efficient data analysis and anomaly detection.
result Enhanced analytics tools and continuous learning are key to overcoming challenges.
New method audits DP guarantees without noise or subsampling info.
problem Auditing DP guarantees of ML models without prior info.
method Histogram-based density estimation for lower bounds.
result Natural generalization of membership inference auditing.
New divergences help audit DP in high dimensions.
problem Challenges in auditing DP in high-dimensional data.
method Propose kernel Rényi divergence and its regularized version for auditing.
result Regularized kernel Rényi divergence can be estimated from samples in high dimensions.
Develops a method to continuously audit black-box conditional quantile forecasts.
problem Continuous monitoring of black-box forecasts under changing data streams and regimes.
method Distribution-free and game-theoretic testing framework for non-i.i.d. losses.
result Derives finite-time detection guarantees for miscalibrated forecasts based on features.
Improved canary crafting for one-run privacy auditing reduces leakage estimates.
problem Detecting canaries in one-run privacy auditing to estimate leakage effectively.
method Optimizes canaries for detectability and diversity, using a greedy initialization and bilevel optimization.
result Achieves stronger leakage estimates at lower computational cost.
Interpole learns transparent decision-making policies from data.
problem Understanding human decision-making in opaque environments.
method Interpole combines belief-update and belief-action mapping estimation.
result Interpole provides interpretable models of decision-making behavior.
Fine-tuning LLMs on privacy-sensitive data introduces privacy risk, and synthetic data audits can quantify this risk.
problem Fine-tuning LLMs on privacy-sensitive data introduces privacy risk.
method Generate synthetic canaries via high-temperature sampling from LLMs.
result Synthetic canaries are high-influence outliers that ensure strong audits.
Fairness audits fail under missing protected labels, especially at zero access.
problem Understanding the reliability of fairness audits with incomplete protected-label data.
method Introduced a seed-calibrated stress test to separate missingness effects from seed-to-seed movement.
result Missing protected labels do not significantly alter fairness mitigation methods, but they can lead to harmful intersectional outcomes.
Audited Conformal Prediction improves conditional coverage in pretrained models under distribution shift.
problem Uncertainty quantification for pretrained models under unknown distribution shift
method Leverages a small labeled dataset to train an audit model for marginal coverage, integrates outputs into conformal prediction framework
result Significantly higher conditional coverage than existing approaches
To help enforce data-protection regulations such as GDPR and detect unauthorized uses of personal data, we develop a new \emph{model auditing} technique that helps users check if their data was used to train a machine learning model. We focus on auditing deep-learning models that generate natural-language text, includi…
Study efficient auditing of ML fairness models.
problem Scalability of auditing ML models for fairness.
method Query-based auditing algorithms for estimating demographic parity.
result Optimal deterministic and practical randomized algorithms for fairness estimation.
Study cost-effective fairness audits with partial feedback, improving over random exploration.
problem Auditing fairness of classifiers with limited true labels.
method Introduces cost model, proposes near-optimal algorithms for black-box and mixture models.
result Significantly lower audit costs compared to natural baselines.
Develops tools to audit ML models for bias and unfairness.
problem Auditing ML models for individual bias and unfairness.
method Formalizes the task as an optimization problem and develops inferential tools for the optimal value.
result Demonstrates the utility of tools in revealing biases in COMPAS recidivism prediction instrument.
Algorithm identifies best arm with biased proxy and selective ground truth audits.
problem Fixed-confidence best-arm identification with biased proxy and selective ground truth.
method Propensity-weighted estimator and adaptive auditing algorithm.
result Plug-in Neyman rule achieves near-oracle audit efficiency.
Proposes PA-DSL for correcting noisy human labels in automated data labeling.
problem Noisy human labels in automated data labeling.
method Uses adjudicated cases to correct noisy human labels and debias analyses.
result Maintains nominal coverage and reduces RMSE by 10-17% relative to using only adjudicated labels.
LLMs prefer Bitcoin under crisis frames, affecting financial decisions.
problem Testing whether LLMs have built-in biases towards specific financial assets.
method Developed a three-level audit protocol to examine Bitcoin's representation and influence in LLMs.
result An identifiable internal feature in LLMs can be perturbed to move financial choices, but only within measurable limits.
Motivated by the need to audit complex and black box models, there has been extensive research on quantifying how data features influence model predictions. Feature influence can be direct (a direct influence on model outcomes) and indirect (model outcomes are influenced via proxy features). Feature influence can also …
This paper introduces a new classification tool named Silas, which is built to provide a more transparent and dependable data analytics service. A focus of Silas is on providing a formal foundation of decision trees in order to support logical analysis and verification of learned prediction models. This paper describes…
Data-trained predictive models see widespread use, but for the most part they are used as black boxes which output a prediction or score. It is therefore hard to acquire a deeper understanding of model behavior, and in particular how different features influence the model prediction. This is important when interpreting…