United States

Making fair decisions is crucial to ethically implementing machine learning algorithms in social settings. In this work, we consider the celebrated definition of counterfactual fairness [Kusner et al., NeurIPS, 2017]. We begin by showing that an algorithm which satisfies counterfactual fairness also satisfies demographic parity, a far simpler fairness constraint. Similarly, we show that all algorithms satisfying demographic parity can be trivially modified to satisfy counterfactual fairness. Together, our results indicate that counterfactual fairness is basically equivalent to demographic parity, which has important implications for the growing body of work on counterfactual fairness. We then validate our theoretical findings empirically, analyzing three existing algorithms for counterfactual fairness against three simple benchmarks. We find that two simple benchmark algorithms outperform all three existing algorithms---in terms of fairness, accuracy, and efficiency---on several data sets. Our analysis leads us to formalize a concrete fairness goal: to preserve the order of individuals within protected groups. We believe transparency around the ordering of individuals within protected groups makes fair algorithms more trustworthy. By design, the two simple benchmark algorithms satisfy this goal while the existing algorithms do not.

AAAI 2023

Counterfactual Fairness Is Basically Demographic Parity

bias fairness & equity

societal impact of ai

causal learning

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
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The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

poster

In this paper, we study a daycare matching problem in Japan and report the design and implementation of a new centralized algorithm, which is going to be deployed in one municipality in the Tokyo metropolis. There are two features that make this market different from the classical hospital-doctor matching problem: i) some children are initially enrolled and prefer to be transferred to other daycare centers; ii) one family may be associated with two or more children and is allowed to submit preferences over combinations of daycare centers. We revisit some well-studied properties including individual rationality, non-wastefulness, as well as stability, and generalize them to this new setting. We design an algorithm based on integer programming (IP) that captures these properties and conduct experiments on five real-life data sets provided by three municipalities. Experimental results show that i) our algorithm performs at least as well as currently used methods in terms of numbers of matched children and blocking coalition; ii) we can find a stable outcome for all instances, although the existence of such an outcome is not guaranteed in theory.

Daycare Matching in Japan: Transfers and Siblings

Many policies in the US are determined locally, e.g., at the county-level. Local policy regimes provide flexibility between regions, but may become less effective in the presence of geographic spillovers, where populations circumvent local restrictions by traveling to less restricted regions nearby. Due to the endogenous nature of policymaking, there have been few opportunities to reliably estimate causal spillover effects or evaluate their impact on local policies. In this work, we identify a novel setting and develop a suitable methodology that allow us to make unconfounded estimates of spillover effects of local policies. Focusing on California’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy, we leverage how county-level mobility restrictions were deterministically set by public COVID-19 severity statistics, enabling a regression discontinuity design framework to estimate spillovers between counties. We estimate these effects using a mobility network with billions of timestamped edges and find significant spillover movement, with larger effects in retail, eating places, and gyms. Contrasting local and global policy regimes, our spillover estimates suggest that county-level restrictions are only 54% as effective as statewide restrictions at reducing mobility. However, an intermediate strategy of macro-county restrictions---where we optimize county partitions by solving a minimum k-cut problem on a graph weighted by our spillover estimates---can recover over 90% of statewide mobility reductions, while maintaining substantial flexibility between counties.

Estimating geographic spillover effects of COVID-19 policies from large-scale mobility networks

The soaring number of personal mobile devices and public cameras poses a threat to fundamental human rights and ethical principles. For example, the stolen of private information such as face image by malicious third parties will lead to catastrophic consequences. By manipulating appearance of face in the image, most of existing protection algorithms are effective but irreversible. Here, we propose a practical and systematic solution to invertiblely protect face information in the full-process pipeline from camera to final users. Specifically, We design a novel lightweight Flow-based Face Encryption Method (FFEM) on the local embedded system privately connected to the camera,  minimizing the risk of  eavesdropping during data transmission. FFEM uses a flow-based face encoder to encode each face to a Gaussian distribution and encrypts the encoded face feature by random rotating the Gaussian distribution with the rotation matrix is as the password. While encrypted latent-variable face  images  are sent to users through public but less reliable channels, password will be protected through more secure channels through technologies such as asymmetric encryption, blockchain, or other sophisticated security schemes. User could select to decode an image with fake faces from the encrypted image on the public channel. Only trusted users are able to recover the original face  using the encrypted matrix transmitted in secure channel. More interestingly, by  tuning Gaussian ball in latent space, we could control the fairness of the replaced face on attributes such as gender and race. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our solution could protect privacy and enhance fairness with minimal effect on high-level downstream task.

People taking photos that faces never share: Privacy Protection and Fairness Enhancement from Camera to User

Modeling and shaping how information spreads through a network is a major research topic in network analysis. While initially the focus has been mostly on efficiency, recently fairness criteria have been taken into account in this setting.
Most work has focused on the maximin criteria however, and thus still different groups can receive very different shares of information. In this work we propose to consider fairness as a notion to be guaranteed by an algorithm rather than as a criterion to be maximized. To this end, we propose three optimization problems that aim at maximizing the overall spread while enforcing strict levels of demographic parity fairness via constraints (either ex-post or ex-ante). The level of fairness hence becomes a user choice rather than a property to be observed upon output. We study this setting from various perspectives.
First, we prove that the cost of introducing demographic parity can be high in terms of both overall spread and computational complexity, i.e., the price of fairness may be unbounded for all three problems and optimal solutions are hard to compute, in some case even approximately or when fairness constraints may be violated. 
For one of our problems, we still design an algorithm with both constant approximation factor and fairness violation.
We also give two heuristics that allow the user to choose the tolerated fairness violation. By means of an extensive experimental study, we show that our algorithms perform well in practice, that is, they achieve the best demographic parity fairness values. For certain instances we additionally even obtain an overall spread comparable to the most efficient algorithms that come without any fairness guarantee, indicating that the empirical price of fairness may actually be small when using our algorithms.

On the Cost of Demographic Parity in Influence Maximization

In artificial intelligence (AI), negative social impact (NSI) represents the negative effect on the society as a result of mistakes conducted by AI agents. While the photo classification problem has been widely studied in the AI community, the NSI made by photo misclassification is largely ignored due to the lack of quantitative measurements of the NSI and effective approaches to reduce it. In this paper, we focus on an NSI-aware photo classification problem where the goal is to develop a novel crowd-AI collaborative learning framework that leverages online crowd workers to quantitatively estimate and effectively reduce the NSI of misclassified photos. Our problem is motivated by the limitations of current NSI-aware photo classification approaches that either 1) cannot accurately estimate NSI because they simply model NSI as the semantic difference between true and misclassified categories or 2) require costly human annotations to estimate NSI of pairwise class categories. To address such limitations, we develop SocialCrowd, a crowdsourcing-based NSI-aware photo classification framework that explicitly reduces the NSI of photo misclassification by designing a duo relational NSI-aware graph with the NSI estimated by online crowd workers. The evaluation results on two large-scale image datasets show that SocialCrowd not only reduces the NSI of photo misclassification but also improves the classification accuracy on both datasets.

A Crowd-AI Collaborative Duo Relational Graph Learning Framework Towards Social Impact Aware Photo Classification

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are widely employed for describing real-world data with intricate entities and relationships. To automatically utilize their semantic information, graph neural architecture search has recently been developed on various tasks of HINs. Existing works, on the other hand, show weaknesses in instability and inflexibility.
To address these issues, we propose a novel method called Partial Message Meta Multigraph search (PMMM) to automatically optimize the neural architecture design on HINs. Specifically, to learn how graph neural networks (GNNs) propagate messages along various types of edges, PMMM adopts an efficient differentiable framework to search for a meaningful meta multigraph, which can capture more flexible and complex semantic relations than a meta graph. The differentiable search typically suffers from performance instability, so we further propose a stable algorithm called partial message search to ensure that the searched meta multigraph consistently surpasses the manually designed meta-structures, i.e., meta-paths. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets over two representative tasks, including node classification and recommendation, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art heterogeneous GNNs, finds out meaningful meta multigraphs, and is significantly more stable. Our code is available at https://github.com/JHL-HUST/PMMM.

Differentiable Meta Multigraph Search with Partial Message Propagation on Heterogeneous Information Networks

In this work, we address the problem of scene-aware 3D human avatar generation based on human-scene interactions. In particular, we pay attention to the fact that physical contact between a 3D human and a scene (i.e., physical human-scene interactions) requires a geometrical alignment to generate natural 3D human avatar. Motivated by this fact, we present a new 3D human generation framework that considers geometric alignment on potential contact areas between 3D human avatars and their surroundings. In addition, we introduce a compact yet effective human pose classifier that classifies the human pose and provides potential contact areas of the 3D human avatar. It allows us to adaptively use geometric alignment loss according to the classified human pose. Compared to state-of-the-art method, our method can generate physically and semantically plausible 3D humans that interact naturally with 3D scenes without additional post-processing. In our evaluations, we achieve the improvements with more plausible interactions and more variety of poses than prior research in qualitative and quantitative analysis. Project page: https://bupyeonghealer.github.io/phin/.

Pose-guided 3D Human Generation in Indoor Scene

Traditional low-rank methods overlook residuals as corruptions, but we discovered that low-rank residuals actually keep image edges together with corrupt components. Therefore, filtering out such structural information could hamper the discriminative details in images, especially in heavy corruptions. In order to address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel method named ESL-LRR, which preserves image edges by finding image projections from low-rank residuals. Specifically, our approach is built in a manifold learning framework where residuals are regarded as another view of image data. Edge preserved image projections are then pursued using a dynamic affinity graph regularization to capture the more accurate similarity between residuals while suppressing the influence of corrupt ones. With this adaptive approach, the proposed method can also find image intrinsic low-rank representation, and much discriminative edge preserved projections. As a result, a new classification strategy is introduced, aligning both modalities to enhance accuracy. Experiments are conducted on several benchmark image datasets, including MNIST, LFW, and COIL100. The results show that the proposed method has clear advantages over compared state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, such as Low-Rank Embedding (LRE), Low-Rank Preserving Projection via Graph Regularized Reconstruction (LRPP_GRR), and Feature Selective Projection (FSP) with more than 2% improvement, particularly in corrupted cases.

Edge Structure Learning via Low Rank Residuals for Robust Image Classification

The limited number of actors and actions in existing datasets make 3D pose estimators tend to overfit, which can be seen from the performance degradation of the algorithm on cross-datasets, especially for rare and complex poses. Although previous data augmentation works have increased the diversity of the training set, the changes in camera viewpoint and position play a dominant role in improving the accuracy of the estimator, while the generated 3D poses are limited and still heavily rely on the source dataset. In addition, these works do not consider the adaptability of the pose estimator to generated data, and complex poses will cause training collapse. In this paper, we propose the CEE-Net, a Complementary End-to-End Network for 3D human pose generation and estimation. The generator extremely expands the distribution of each joint-angle in the existing dataset and limits them to a reasonable range. By learning the correlations within and between the torso and limbs, the estimator can combine different body-parts more effectively and weaken the influence of specific joint-angle changes on the global pose, improving the generalization ability. Extensive ablation studies show that our pose generator greatly strengthens the joint-angle distribution, and our pose estimator can utilize these poses positively. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method can achieve much better performance on various cross-datasets, rare and complex poses.

CEE-Net: Complementary End-to-End Network for 3D Human Pose Generation and Estimation

In recent years, online lending platforms have been becoming attractive for micro-financing and popular in financial industries. However, such online lending platforms face a high risk of failure due to the lack of expertise on borrowers' creditworthness. Thus, risk forecasting is important to avoid economic loss. Detecting loan fraud users in advance is at the heart of risk forecasting. The purpose of fraud user (borrower) detection is to predict whether one user will fail to make required payments in the future. Detecting fraud users depend on historical loan records. However, a large proportion of users lack such information, especially for new users. In this paper, we attempt to detect loan fraud users from cross domain heterogeneous data views, including user attributes, installed app lists, app installation behaviors, and app-in logs, which compensate for the lack of historical loan records. However, it is difficult to effectively fuse the multiple heterogeneous data views. Moreover, some samples miss one or even more data views, increasing the difficulty in fusion. To address the challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end deep multiview learning approach, which encodes heterogeneous data views into homogeneous ones, generates the missing views based on the learned relationship among all the views, and then fuses all the views together to a comprehensive view for identifying fraud users. Our model is evaluated on a real-world large-scale dataset consisting of 401,978 loan records of 228,117 users from January 1, 2019, to September 30, 2019, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. 

Counterfactual Fairness Is Basically Demographic Parity

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