End-to-end framework learns precise disparity for activity recognition.
problem Precise portrayal of intraclass disparity in activity recognition.
method Knowledge-directed adversarial learning framework with two competitive encoding distributions.
result Robust and generalizable performance on HAR benchmark datasets.
Study shows explanation disparities in machine learning models are influenced by data and model properties.
problem Disparities in post-hoc machine learning explanation methods across race and gender.
method Simulations and experiments on a real-world dataset to assess challenges to explanation disparities.
result Increased covariate shift, concept shift, and omission of covariates increase explanation disparities, especially for neural network models.
Following related work in law and policy, two notions of disparity have come to shape the study of fairness in algorithmic decision-making. Algorithms exhibit treatment disparity if they formally treat members of protected subgroups differently; algorithms exhibit impact disparity when outcomes differ across subgroups,…
Develops methods for fair classification under linear disparity constraints.
problem Disparate impacts of machine learning algorithms on protected groups.
method Bayes-optimal fair classification methods via pre-, in-, and post-processing.
result Explicit forms of Bayes-optimal fair classifiers under linear disparity measures.
We provide the asymptotic distribution of the major indexes used in the statistical literature to quantify disparate treatment in machine learning. We aim at promoting the use of confidence intervals when testing the so-called group disparate impact. We illustrate on some examples the importance of using confidence int…
A membership inference attack (MIA) against a machine-learning model enables an attacker to determine whether a given data record was part of the model's training data or not. In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of the phenomenon of disparate vulnerability against MIAs: unequal success rate of MIAs against diff…
We combine multi-task learning and semi-supervised learning by inducing a joint embedding space between disparate label spaces and learning transfer functions between label embeddings, enabling us to jointly leverage unlabelled data and auxiliary, annotated datasets. We evaluate our approach on a variety of sequence cl…
Bayesian model identifies health disparities in disease progression.
problem Health disparities bias disease progression models.
method Interpretable Bayesian model accounting for three disparities.
result Model identifies and corrects for health disparities.
Study decomposes racial healthcare disparities via shifts in mediator distributions.
problem Racial disparities in healthcare expenditures and their underlying drivers.
method Framework decomposing disparities into mediator distribution shifts and residual components, using MEPS data.
result Substantial disparities persist even when mediators are equalized, suggesting unmeasured or structural factors.
DCEM algorithm reduces bias in machine learning models trained on selective labels.
problem Bias in machine learning models trained on selective labels.
method Disparate Censorship Expectation-Maximization (DCEM) algorithm.
result DCEM improves bias mitigation without sacrificing discriminative performance.
New method evaluates multiple social disparities using machine learning.
problem Reduction of educational disparities across multiple dimensions.
method Triply-Robust Machine Learning Approach for Causal Decomposition Analysis.
result Simultaneous interventions across multiple domains reduce disparities.
Automated data-driven decision making systems are increasingly being used to assist, or even replace humans in many settings. These systems function by learning from historical decisions, often taken by humans. In order to maximize the utility of these systems (or, classifiers), their training involves minimizing the e…
Paper explores fair classification with bounded disparity using finite datasets.
problem Ensuring fairness in binary classification with protected groups.
method Minimax optimal approach with fairness constraints and demographic disparity control.
result Proposes FairBayes-DDP+ method that achieves minimax lower bound on fairness-aware excess risk.
Study highlights fairness issues in travel behavior prediction models.
problem Ethical challenges in travel behavior analysis using machine learning.
method Operationalized computational fairness by equality of opportunity; compared DNN and DCM; introduced absolute correlation regularization.
result Both DNN and DCM predict disparities across social groups, with DNN outperforming DCM in prediction disparities.
When the performance of a machine learning model varies over groups defined by sensitive attributes (e.g., gender or ethnicity), the performance disparity can be expressed in terms of the probability distributions of the input and output variables over each group. In this paper, we exploit this fact to reduce the dispa…
Paper tackles fairness in CCA by minimizing correlation disparity error.
problem Fairness issues in CCA.
method Framework to minimize correlation disparity error in CCA.
result Reduces correlation disparity error without sacrificing CCA accuracy.
The paper analyzes how deep neural networks handle noisy labels and finds disparate impacts.
problem Disparate impacts of noisy labels on instances with different representation frequencies.
method Quantifying harms, analyzing solutions, and comparing their impacts on different frequency instances.
result Existing solutions lead to disparate treatments, benefiting higher-frequency instances more.
New method reduces privacy impact on model accuracy for underrepresented groups.
problem Privacy mechanisms disproportionately affect underrepresented groups in machine learning models.
method Proposes DPSGD-F, a modified DPSGD that adjusts group contributions based on clipping bias.
result DPSGD-F removes disparate impact of differential privacy on model accuracy for protected groups.
The paper studies and mitigates accuracy disparity in regression models.
problem Accuracy disparity between different demographic subgroups in high-stakes domains.
method Error decomposition theorem and distribution alignment algorithm.
result The proposed algorithm effectively mitigates accuracy disparity while maintaining predictive power.
The paper introduces return parity for fairness in MDPs, addressing delayed and adverse effects.
problem Fairness in MDPs for dynamic domains with delayed and adverse effects.
method Proposes return parity, decomposes return disparity, and develops algorithms for state visitation distributional alignment.
result The proposed algorithms can successfully close the disparity gap while maintaining policy performance.
In the context of machine learning, disparate impact refers to a form of systematic discrimination whereby the output distribution of a model depends on the value of a sensitive attribute (e.g., race or gender). In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic framework to analyze the disparate impact of a binary cla…
Study federates measurement of demographic disparities from quantile sketches.
problem Misalignment of fairness goals with siloed data collection and privacy regulations.
method Federated auditing of demographic parity through score distributions, using Wasserstein--Frechet variance and quantile summaries.
result Proposes a one-shot, communication-efficient protocol to estimate global disparity and its decomposition.
New method to quantify feature contributions to disparity without access to decision-making model.
problem Quantifying feature contributions to disparity when decision-making model is not accessible.
method Use information theory to measure redundant statistical dependency between protected attribute and feature.
result Quantify feature contributions to disparity using information theory.
Machine learning systems have received much attention recently for their ability to achieve expert-level performance on clinical tasks, particularly in medical imaging. Here, we examine the extent to which state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers trained to yield diagnostic labels from X-ray images are biased with re…
Study shows label errors impact model disparity metrics, proposing mitigation methods.
problem Impact of label errors on model disparity metrics.
method Empirical study, characterizing label error effects; proposing estimation and relabeling methods.
result Label errors significantly affect model disparity metrics, particularly for minority groups.
Proposes a method to quantify and decompose disparity in ML models, separating exempt and non-exempt components.
problem Quantifying disparity in ML models, especially when certain features are exempted due to their critical importance.
method Information-theoretic decomposition into exempt and non-exempt components, satisfying desirable properties.
result Proposes a measure of non-exempt disparity that satisfies all desirable properties, and shows impossibility results for observational measures.
Study reveals class disparities in balanced datasets through spectral imbalance.
problem Class disparities in balanced datasets are overlooked despite model performance gaps.
method Developed a theoretical framework and studied 11 encoders to diagnose spectral imbalance.
result Identified spectral imbalance as a source of class disparities in balanced datasets.
Recent work has shown that optical flow estimation can be formulated as a supervised learning task and can be successfully solved with convolutional networks. Training of the so-called FlowNet was enabled by a large synthetically generated dataset. The present paper extends the concept of optical flow estimation via co…
Adversarial training can lead to unfair accuracy disparities between different groups.
problem Adversarial training algorithms introduce unfair accuracy disparities between different groups of data.
method Propose a Fair-Robust-Learning (FRL) framework to mitigate unfairness in adversarial defenses.
result Empirical and theoretical validation of FRL's effectiveness in mitigating unfairness.
There is growing interest in applying machine learning methods to Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Across different institutions, however, EMR quality can vary widely. This work investigated the impact of this disparity on the performance of three advanced machine learning algorithms: logistic regression, multilayer p…
Paper finds sharpness differences in transformer blocks accelerating LLM training.
problem Understanding and accelerating large language model pre-training.
method Uncovering sharpness disparity across transformer blocks and proposing Blockwise Learning Rate.
result Blockwise Learning Rate strategy accelerates LLM pre-training with lower loss and speedup.
The paper examines how adversarial robustness affects accuracy disparity across different classes.
problem Understanding the impact of adversarial robustness on accuracy disparity across different classes.
method Linear classifiers under a Gaussian mixture model, decomposing the impact into inherent and imbalance effects.
result Adversarial robustness consistently degrades standard accuracy in balanced classes, but the class imbalance ratio plays a different role in accuracy disparity.
Paper addresses the disparity between sampled and mean representations in disentangled learning.
problem Disparity between sampled and mean representations in disentangled learning.
method Proposes a method to eliminate the disparity by proving and utilizing the relationship between total correlation of sampled and mean representations for multivariate normal distributions.
result Demonstrates that a factorized mean representation can have lower total correlation than the sampled representation.
The paper provides CI for test unfairness of group-fairness-aware classifiers trained with online SGD.
problem Ensuring fairness in machine learning models trained with stochastic gradient descent.
method Developed an online multiplier bootstrap method to estimate CI for test unfairness of DI and DM-aware linear classifiers.
result Asymptotic Central Limit Theorem holds for CI estimation of DI and DM-aware models.
Semi-supervised learning benefits the rich more than the poor, affecting fairness.
problem Disparate impact of semi-supervised learning on different sub-populations.
method Theoretical and empirical analysis of a broad family of SSL algorithms using pseudo-labels.
result Semi-supervised learning benefits the rich more than the poor, potentially violating fairness.
Introduces causal fairness analysis to address unfairness in AI decisions.
problem Fairness issues in AI decision-making.
method Link observed disparities to underlying causal mechanisms.
result Develops Fairness Map and Fairness Cookbook.
In this paper, we present some theoretical work to explain why simple gradient descent methods are so successful in solving non-convex optimization problems in learning large-scale neural networks (NN). After introducing a mathematical tool called canonical space, we have proved that the objective functions in learning…
Develops algorithm to reduce real-world inequality.
problem Reduces inequality in real-world disparities.
method Impact remediation framework using social science insights and constrained optimization.
result Optimal intervention policies discovered to improve equity.
Conformal prediction sets can lead to unfair outcomes.
problem Disparate impact in decision-making with conformal prediction sets.
method Experiments with human participants to demonstrate disparate impact and propose equalizing set sizes across groups.
result Providing prediction sets that satisfy Equalized Coverage increases disparate impact compared to marginal coverage.
Develops causal framework for fair survival analysis in healthcare.
problem Fairness in survival analysis for high-stakes domains like healthcare.
method Causal framework using graphical models, conditional survival function, and Causal Reduction Theorem.
result Decomposes disparities in survival into direct, indirect, and spurious pathways.
EL framework certifies and flags bias in ML models without distributional assumptions.
problem Systematic performance disparities across sensitive subpopulations in ML models.
method Empirical likelihood-based approach for non-parametric fairness auditing.
result EL framework outperforms bootstrap methods in certification and subpopulation discovery.
A new method for ILO with transition model disparity using an intermediary policy.
problem Learning tasks from expert observations with different transition dynamics.
method Training an intermediary policy to match the state transitions of the expert dataset.
result Our method outperforms existing ILO approaches with transition model mismatch.
Develops a framework for fair semi-supervised learning.
problem Balancing fairness and accuracy in semi-supervised learning.
method Formulates a framework as an optimization problem, incorporating classifier loss, label propagation loss, and fairness constraints.
result Achieves fair semi-supervised learning with better accuracy-fairness trade-off than fair supervised learning.
mvlearn simplifies multiview machine learning for non-specialists.
problem Handling multiview data sets from disparate sources.
method Python library implementing multiview machine learning methods.
result Enables non-specialists to use multiview machine learning methods easily.
New causal analysis reconciles predictive and statistical fairness.
problem Mutual exclusivity of predictive and statistical fairness notions.
method Derive a new causal decomposition formula for fairness measures.
result Predictive and statistical fairness are complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Where machine-learned predictive risk scores inform high-stakes decisions, such as bail and sentencing in criminal justice, fairness has been a serious concern. Recent work has characterized the disparate impact that such risk scores can have when used for a binary classification task. This may not account, however, fo…
The paper proposes a fair reinforcement learning framework to prevent healthcare disparities.
problem Unfair reinforcement learning policies in healthcare can lead to socioeconomically-disadvantaged subgroups being underprivileged.
method The paper introduces a counterfactual fairness framework and a sequential data preprocessing algorithm to achieve fair sequential decision making.
result The proposed approach greatly enhances fair access to counseling in a digital health dataset designed to reduce opioid misuse.
What does it mean for an algorithm to be biased? In U.S. law, unintentional bias is encoded via disparate impact, which occurs when a selection process has widely different outcomes for different groups, even as it appears to be neutral. This legal determination hinges on a definition of a protected class (ethnicity, g…