Building trustworthy, effective, and responsible machine learning systems hinges on understanding how differences in training data and modeling decisions interact to impact predictive performance. In this work, we seek to better understand how we might characterize, detect, and design for data-model synergies. We focus on a particular type of data-model inefficiency, in which adding training data from some sources can actually lower performance evaluated on key sub-groups of the population, a phenomenon we refer to as negative data externalities on group performance. Such externalities can arise in standard learning settings and can manifest differently depending on conditions between training set size and model size. Data externalities directly imply a lower bound on feasible model improvements, yet improving models efficiently requires understanding the underlying data-model tensions. From a broader perspective, our results indicate that data-efficiency is a key component of both accurate and trustworthy machine learning.

在基于文本的分类器中测试公平性问题的一种常见方法是通过使用反事实来：如果更改输入中的敏感属性，则分类器输出是否会更改？现有的反事实生成方法通常依赖于单词列表或模板，产生不考虑语法，上下文或微妙敏感属性引用的简单反事实，并且可能会错过WordList创建者未考虑的问题。在本文中，我们介绍了一项为克服这些缺点而产生的反事实的任务，并证明了如何利用大型语言模型（LLM）来在此任务上取得进展。我们表明，这种基于LLM的方法可以产生现有方法无法实现的复杂反事实，从而比较了民事评论数据集中各种反事实生成方法的性能，并在评估毒性分类器时显示出它们的价值。

神经网络缺乏对抗性鲁棒性，即，它们容易受到对抗的例子，通过对输入的小扰动导致错误的预测。此外，当模型给出错误的预测时，信任被破坏，即，预测的概率不是我们应该相信我们模型的良好指标。在本文中，我们研究了对抗性鲁棒性和校准之间的联系，发现模型对小扰动敏感的输入（很容易攻击）更有可能具有较差的预测。基于这种洞察力，我们通过解决这些对抗的缺陷输入来研究校准。为此，我们提出了基于对抗基于对抗的自适应标签平滑（AR-AD），其通过适应性软化标签，通过适应性软化标签来整合对抗性鲁棒性和校准到训练中的相关性，这是基于对敌人可以攻击的容易攻击。我们发现我们的方法，考虑了分销数据的对抗性稳健性，即使在分布班次下也能够更好地校准模型。此外，还可以应用于集合模型，以进一步提高模型校准。

工业推荐系统处理极大的行动空间 - 许多数百万的项目推荐。此外，他们需要为数十亿用户服务，他们在任何时间点都是独一无止的，制作复杂的用户状态空间。幸运的是，可以学习大量记录的隐式反馈（例如，用户点击，停留时间）。然而，从记录的反馈中学习，才受到仅通过以前版本的推荐器选择的建议的反馈而导致的偏差。在这项工作中，我们展示了在YouTube的生产Top-K推荐系统中解决此类偏差的一般配方，以策略梯度为基础的算法，即加强。本文的贡献是：（1）缩放到生产推荐系统，以数百万的订单为行动空间; （2）申请违规纠正以解决从多种行为策略收集的记录反馈中学习数据偏差; （3）提出新的Top-K违规纠正，以占我们的政策一次推荐多个项目; （4）展示勘探的价值。我们展示了我们通过一系列模拟和youtube上的多个实时实验的方法。

We derive a set of causal deep neural networks whose architectures are a consequence of tensor (multilinear) factor analysis. Forward causal questions are addressed with a neural network architecture composed of causal capsules and a tensor transformer. The former estimate a set of latent variables that represent the causal factors, and the latter governs their interaction. Causal capsules and tensor transformers may be implemented using shallow autoencoders, but for a scalable architecture we employ block algebra and derive a deep neural network composed of a hierarchy of autoencoders. An interleaved kernel hierarchy preprocesses the data resulting in a hierarchy of kernel tensor factor models. Inverse causal questions are addressed with a neural network that implements multilinear projection and estimates the causes of effects. As an alternative to aggressive bottleneck dimension reduction or regularized regression that may camouflage an inherently underdetermined inverse problem, we prescribe modeling different aspects of the mechanism of data formation with piecewise tensor models whose multilinear projections are well-defined and produce multiple candidate solutions. Our forward and inverse neural network architectures are suitable for asynchronous parallel computation.

The existing methods for video anomaly detection mostly utilize videos containing identifiable facial and appearance-based features. The use of videos with identifiable faces raises privacy concerns, especially when used in a hospital or community-based setting. Appearance-based features can also be sensitive to pixel-based noise, straining the anomaly detection methods to model the changes in the background and making it difficult to focus on the actions of humans in the foreground. Structural information in the form of skeletons describing the human motion in the videos is privacy-protecting and can overcome some of the problems posed by appearance-based features. In this paper, we present a survey of privacy-protecting deep learning anomaly detection methods using skeletons extracted from videos. We present a novel taxonomy of algorithms based on the various learning approaches. We conclude that skeleton-based approaches for anomaly detection can be a plausible privacy-protecting alternative for video anomaly detection. Lastly, we identify major open research questions and provide guidelines to address them.

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

We propose reconstruction probing, a new analysis method for contextualized representations based on reconstruction probabilities in masked language models (MLMs). This method relies on comparing the reconstruction probabilities of tokens in a given sequence when conditioned on the representation of a single token that has been fully contextualized and when conditioned on only the decontextualized lexical prior of the model. This comparison can be understood as quantifying the contribution of contextualization towards reconstruction -- the difference in the reconstruction probabilities can only be attributed to the representational change of the single token induced by contextualization. We apply this analysis to three MLMs and find that contextualization boosts reconstructability of tokens that are close to the token being reconstructed in terms of linear and syntactic distance. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to finer-grained decomposition of contextualized representations, and we find that these boosts are largely attributable to static and positional embeddings at the input layer.

Diffusion models have achieved justifiable popularity by attaining state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic objects from seemingly arbitrarily complex data distributions, including when conditioning generation on labels. Unfortunately, however, their iterative nature renders them very computationally inefficient during the sampling process. For the multi-class conditional generation problem, we propose a novel, structurally unique framework of diffusion models which are hierarchically branched according to the inherent relationships between classes. In this work, we demonstrate that branched diffusion models offer major improvements in efficiently generating samples from multiple classes. We also showcase several other advantages of branched diffusion models, including ease of extension to novel classes in a continual-learning setting, and a unique interpretability that offers insight into these generative models. Branched diffusion models represent an alternative paradigm to their traditional linear counterparts, and can have large impacts in how we use diffusion models for efficient generation, online learning, and scientific discovery.

The widely studied task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) requires a system to recognize whether one piece of text is textually entailed by another, i.e. whether the entirety of its meaning can be inferred from the other. In current NLI datasets and models, textual entailment relations are typically defined on the sentence- or paragraph-level. However, even a simple sentence often contains multiple propositions, i.e. distinct units of meaning conveyed by the sentence. As these propositions can carry different truth values in the context of a given premise, we argue for the need to recognize the textual entailment relation of each proposition in a sentence individually. We propose PropSegmEnt, a corpus of over 35K propositions annotated by expert human raters. Our dataset structure resembles the tasks of (1) segmenting sentences within a document to the set of propositions, and (2) classifying the entailment relation of each proposition with respect to a different yet topically-aligned document, i.e. documents describing the same event or entity. We establish strong baselines for the segmentation and entailment tasks. Through case studies on summary hallucination detection and document-level NLI, we demonstrate that our conceptual framework is potentially useful for understanding and explaining the compositionality of NLI labels.