Helps visually impaired users make better decisions by adjusting their observations.
problem Systematic biases in users' perception and processing of visual information.
method Synthesizes new observations based on true observations to correct user biases.
result Significant improvement in task performance for users with various biases.
Theoretical model for iterative user discovery in recommender systems.
problem Iterative feedback loops in recommender systems and their biases.
method Theoretical framework to model system evolution and convergence properties.
result Theoretical bounds and convergence properties on user discovery and blind spots.
Study shows how online personalization can lead to unfair models due to biased user responses.
problem Fairness issues in online personalization systems due to biased user responses.
method Formulated a regularization-based approach to mitigate biases in machine learning models.
result Demonstrated that online personalization can cause models to learn unfair behavior from biased user responses.
The possible impact of algorithmic recommendation on the autonomy and free choice of Internet users is being increasingly discussed, especially in terms of the rendering of information and the structuring of interactions. This paper aims at reviewing and framing this issue along a double dichotomy. The first one addres…
Recommender systems are used in variety of domains affecting people's lives. This has raised concerns about possible biases and discrimination that such systems might exacerbate. There are two primary kinds of biases inherent in recommender systems: observation bias and bias stemming from imbalanced data. Observation b…
Adobe research tackles strategic recommendations using reinforcement learning.
problem Optimizing user interactions for long-term objectives in various use-cases.
method Reinforcement learning applied to modeling user behavior and decision-making.
result Practical solutions implemented for various use-cases, addressing fundamental challenges.
ConvNets and Imagenet have driven the recent success of deep learning for image classification. However, the marked slowdown in performance improvement combined with the lack of robustness of neural networks to adversarial examples and their tendency to exhibit undesirable biases question the reliability of these metho…
The growing capability and accessibility of machine learning has led to its application to many real-world domains and data about people. Despite the benefits algorithmic systems may bring, models can reflect, inject, or exacerbate implicit and explicit societal biases into their outputs, disadvantaging certain demogra…
Study shows competition feedback can make ML predictors biased towards specific user groups.
problem How competition affects machine learning predictors and user prediction quality.
method Flexible model of competing ML predictors, empirical and mathematical analysis.
result Competition causes predictors to specialize for specific sub-populations at the cost of general performance.
Industrial recommender systems deal with extremely large action spaces -- many millions of items to recommend. Moreover, they need to serve billions of users, who are unique at any point in time, making a complex user state space. Luckily, huge quantities of logged implicit feedback (e.g., user clicks, dwell time) are …
Paper addresses bias in search intent affecting click behavior.
problem Bias in user search intent affects click behavior and relevance.
method Proposes a search intent bias hypothesis to improve click models.
result Click models can better interpret user clicks and improve retrieval performance.
The paper studies and mitigates bias in recommender systems.
problem Bias in recommender systems caused by user feedback loops.
method Modeling user exposure and proposing debiasing strategies.
result Recommender systems are biased and depend on user exposure.
New framework uses user feedback in CB problems for better decision-making.
problem Improving decision-making in contextual bandit problems with user-triggered feedback.
method Developed a new framework to leverage user-triggered feedback in CB problems, robust to feedback bias.
result Improved regret guarantees for CB algorithms using user feedback.
CausalRM models rewards from user feedback, overcoming noise and bias.
problem Aligning language models with user preferences from noisy, biased feedback.
method Causal-theoretic reward modeling framework addressing noise and bias in observational feedback.
result CausalRM learns accurate reward signals from noisy and biased observational feedback.
Proposes a new IPW-based ranking metric for two-sided markets.
problem Addressing bias in implicit user feedback in two-sided markets.
method Extends IPW estimator to two-sided markets, addressing position bias.
result Proposed estimator is unbiased for ground-truth ranking metric.
Issues regarding explainable AI involve four components: users, laws & regulations, explanations and algorithms. Together these components provide a context in which explanation methods can be evaluated regarding their adequacy. The goal of this chapter is to bridge the gap between expert users and lay users. Different…
We quantify content availability and user discovery opportunities in recommender systems.
problem Determining the maximum probability of recommending content to users.
method Stochastic reachability to compute upper bounds on recommendation likelihood.
result Reachability metrics can detect biases and diagnose user discovery limitations.
The paper tackles biases in session-based recommender systems by modeling user interest as a stochastic process.
problem Data uncertainty, popularity bias, and exposure bias in session-based recommender systems.
method The paper proposes treating user interest as a stochastic process in the latent space, debiasing item embeddings, modeling dense user interest, and introducing fake targets to simulate extended exposure.
result The proposed approach mitigates challenges in session-based recommender systems, as shown by computational experiments on various datasets.
Modeling shared mobility demand considering supply limitations.
problem Inaccurate demand predictions due to limited supply.
method Censored Gaussian Processes for demand modeling.
result Taking supply limitations into account improves demand predictions.
In many machine learning applications, there are multiple decision-makers involved, both automated and human. The interaction between these agents often goes unaddressed in algorithmic development. In this work, we explore a simple version of this interaction with a two-stage framework containing an automated model and…
Federated Learning (FL) systems are gaining popularity as a solution to training Machine Learning (ML) models from large-scale user data collected on personal devices (e.g., smartphones) without their raw data leaving the device. At the core of FL is a network of anonymous user devices sharing training information (mod…
System learns to combine multiple model components for personalized text generation.
problem Adapting and biasing language models for personal preferences.
method Combines model-defined components, learns activation and probability combination from unlabeled text.
result Directly generates text with personalized components from unlabeled data.
The paper identifies and analyzes subjective class issues in user-generated data.
problem Subjective labels in user-generated data can lead to biased and manipulated results.
method Defined subjective and objective classes, proposed a framework for detecting subjective labels.
result Data mining practitioners can detect and avoid subjective class issues early in their projects.
Debias recommender systems by accounting for hidden confounders using network information.
problem Debiased recommender systems to reduce bias caused by hidden confounders.
method Leverage network information to disentangle user conformity and item popularity, modeling exposure and ratings while controlling hidden confounders.
result The proposed method effectively debiases recommender systems, improving recommendation accuracy.
KFAtt improves CTR prediction by modeling user behavior with Kalman filtering attention.
problem Improving CTR prediction in personalized e-commerce search engines.
method KFAtt combines Kalman filtering with attention mechanisms to model user behavior.
result KFAtt outperforms existing methods in CTR prediction, achieving better performance in both offline and online settings.
Previous work on recommender systems mainly focus on fitting the ratings provided by users. However, the response patterns, i.e., some items are rated while others not, are generally ignored. We argue that failing to observe such response patterns can lead to biased parameter estimation and sub-optimal model performanc…
The study aims to prevent unfair content presentation in recommender systems.
problem Over- and under-presentation of content leads to biased user preference estimates.
method Two models are considered: one that ignores systematic and limited exposure, and another that conditions on limited exposure.
result Ignoring systematic presentations overestimates promoted options and underestimates censored alternatives.
A new dataset tracks user interactions and click responses in online marketplaces.
problem Lack of exposure data in recommender systems datasets.
method Proposes a novel dataset including slates and click responses, allowing more accurate likelihood models.
result Models using exposure data show more natural likelihood, reducing bias towards previously exposed items.
Online reviews provide viewpoints on the strengths and shortcomings of products/services, influencing potential customers' purchasing decisions. However, the proliferation of non-credible reviews -- either fake (promoting/ demoting an item), incompetent (involving irrelevant aspects), or biased -- entails the problem o…
FedAVOT improves federated learning by aligning user distributions.
problem Partial client participation leads to biased and unstable updates in federated learning.
method Formulates aggregation as masked optimal transport to align availability and importance distributions.
result Achieves a standard O(1/√T) rate, independent of the number of participating users per round.
Algorithm improves recommendation subset selection in the presence of biases.
problem Maximizing submodular functions for recommendation in the presence of social biases.
method Algorithm for submodular maximization with fairness constraints.
result Algorithm provably outputs subsets with near-optimal utility and proportional representation.
Active learning suffers from biased non-response, which this paper addresses.
problem Active learning's effectiveness is compromised by biased non-response in real-world contexts.
method Proposes a cost-based correction to the sampling strategy, UCB-EU, to mitigate the impact of biased non-response.
result UCB-EU successfully reduces the harm from labelling non-response in many settings.
Improved text generation with constraints using discrete auto-regressive biasing.
problem Balancing fluency and constraint satisfaction in LLM outputs.
method Discrete Auto-regressive Biasing, leveraging gradients in discrete text space.
result Significantly improved constraint satisfaction with comparable fluency.
We propose a scalable Bayesian preference learning method for jointly predicting the preferences of individuals as well as the consensus of a crowd from pairwise labels. Peoples' opinions often differ greatly, making it difficult to predict their preferences from small amounts of personal data. Individual biases also m…
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.
OMIC improves matrix completion with orthonormal side information and nuclear-norm regularization.
problem Matrix completion with improved interpretability and adaptability.
method OMIC combines orthonormal side information and nuclear-norm regularization, optimized by a converging algorithm.
result OMIC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthetic and real-world datasets.
We study fairness in collaborative-filtering recommender systems, which are sensitive to discrimination that exists in historical data. Biased data can lead collaborative-filtering methods to make unfair predictions for users from minority groups. We identify the insufficiency of existing fairness metrics and propose f…
Paper tackles ride-sharing user experience enhancement with weakly supervised learning.
problem Compound weakly supervised learning problem in ride-sharing comment data.
method CWSL method with instance reweighting, robust criteria, and alternating optimization.
result Effectiveness validated on Didi ride-sharing comment data.
Equal experience fairness in recommender systems reduces bias.
problem Bias in data leads to unfair item recommendations.
method Introduces equal experience fairness notion and optimization framework.
result Mitigates unfairness in recommendations with minimal accuracy loss.
Wide-AdGraph detects ads and trackers using a graph of resource requests.
problem Detecting and blocking ad trackers to protect user privacy.
method Combining a large-scale graph of resource requests from multiple websites to train a machine learning algorithm.
result High accuracy (96.1% biased, 90.9% unbiased) in detecting ads and trackers.
Paper proposes CounterSample to improve convergence in LTR models.
problem Large variance in IPS weights slows convergence in LTR models.
method Introduces CounterSample algorithm with provably better convergence.
result CounterSample converges faster than standard IPS-weighted methods.
Extends Demographic Parity for fairer wage predictions with expert knowledge.
problem Inadequate fairness metrics limit user domain knowledge and ignore intersectional fairness.
method Develops a parametric method to incorporate expert knowledge in fair predictions.
result Offers a robust solution for real-life applications with limited data and spending constraints.
The conventional solution to the recommendation problem greedily ranks individual document candidates by prediction scores. However, this method fails to optimize the slate as a whole, and hence, often struggles to capture biases caused by the page layout and document interdepedencies. The slate recommendation problem …
Conventional collaborative filtering techniques treat a top-n recommendations problem as a task of generating a list of the most relevant items. This formulation, however, disregards an opposite - avoiding recommendations with completely irrelevant items. Due to that bias, standard algorithms, as well as commonly used …
Fairmetrics evaluates fairness in ML models for specific groups.
problem Ensuring models do not produce biased outcomes for specific groups.
method User-friendly R package for evaluating group-based fairness criteria.
result Rigorous evaluation of multiple fairness metrics.
This paper tackles selection bias in recommender systems by considering the neighborhood effect.
problem Selection bias in recommender systems due to filtering and user selection.
method Formalizes neighborhood effect as interference problem, introduces treatment representation, and proposes ideal loss.
result Proposed methods achieve unbiased learning when both selection bias and neighborhood effect are present.
EMFs combine deep learning and probabilistic models for better density estimation.
problem Combining domain-specific knowledge with general-purpose deep learning.
method Alternating transformations with structured layers that embed domain-specific inductive biases.
result EMFs induce desirable properties like multimodality and hierarchical coupling.
This note explores probabilistic sampling weighted by uncertainty in active learning. This method has been previously used and authors have tangentially remarked on its efficacy. The scheme has several benefits: (1) it is computationally cheap, (2) it can be implemented in a single-pass streaming fashion which is a ben…