这项研究研究了在美国国税局（IRS）为税收审计选择的系统中，算法公平性问题。尽管算法公平的领域主要围绕着像个人一样对待的概念发展，但我们却探索了垂直平等的概念 - 适当地考虑到个人之间的相关差异 - 这在许多公共政策环境中都是公平性的核心组成部分。应用于美国个人所得税体系的设计，垂直权益与不同收入水平的纳税人之间的税收和执法负担的公平分配有关。通过与财政部和国税局的独特合作，我们使用匿名个人纳税人微型数据，风险选择的审计以及2010 - 14年度的随机审计来研究税务管理的垂直平等。特别是，我们评估了现代机器学习方法选择审核的使用如何影响垂直权益。首先，我们展示了更灵活的机器学习（分类）方法（而不是简单的模型）如何将审计负担从高收入纳税人转移到中等收入纳税人。其次，我们表明，尽管现有的算法公平技术可以减轻跨收入的某些差异，但它们可能会造成巨大的绩效成本。第三，我们表明，是否将低报告的风险视为分类或回归问题的选择是高度的。从分类转变为回归模型，以预测不足的审计转变会大大向高收入个人转移，同时增加收入。最后，我们探讨了差异审计成本在塑造审计分配中的作用。我们表明，对回报的狭窄关注会破坏垂直权益。我们的结果对整个公共部门的算法工具的设计具有影响。

机器学习（ML）越来越多地用于支持高风险的决策，这是由于其相对于人类评估的优势预测能力的承诺而欠的趋势。但是，决策目标与观察到的作为训练ML模型的标签的结果中捕获的内容之间经常存在差距。结果，机器学习模型可能无法捕获决策标准的重要维度，从而阻碍了他们的决策支持。在这项工作中，我们探讨了历史专家决策作为组织信息系统中通常可用的丰富（但不完美）的信息来源，并表明它可以利用它来弥合决策目标与算法目标之间的差距。当数据中的每个案例都由单个专家评估并提出基于影响函数的方法作为解决此问题的解决方案时，我们会间接考虑估计专家一致性的问题。然后，我们将估计的专家一致性通过培训时间标签合并方法纳入预测模型。这种方法使ML模型可以在有推断的专家一致性和观察标签的情况下向专家学习。我们还提出了通过混合和延期模型来利用推断一致性的替代方法。在我们的经验评估中，专注于儿童虐待热线筛查的背景下，我们表明（1）有一些高风险案例，其风险是专家考虑的，但在目标标签中没有完全捕获用于培训已部署模型和培训的目标标签（2）提出的方法可显着提高这些情况的精度。

Recidivism prediction instruments (RPI's) provide decision makers with an assessment of the likelihood that a criminal defendant will reoffend at a future point in time. While such instruments are gaining increasing popularity across the country, their use is attracting tremendous controversy. Much of the controversy concerns potential discriminatory bias in the risk assessments that are produced. This paper discusses a fairness criterion originating in the field of educational and psychological testing that has recently been applied to assess the fairness of recidivism prediction instruments. We demonstrate how adherence to the criterion may lead to considerable disparate impact when recidivism prevalence differs across groups.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world's languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user's goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

Automatic machine translation (MT) metrics are widely used to distinguish the translation qualities of machine translation systems across relatively large test sets (system-level evaluation). However, it is unclear if automatic metrics are reliable at distinguishing good translations from bad translations at the sentence level (segment-level evaluation). In this paper, we investigate how useful MT metrics are at detecting the success of a machine translation component when placed in a larger platform with a downstream task. We evaluate the segment-level performance of the most widely used MT metrics (chrF, COMET, BERTScore, etc.) on three downstream cross-lingual tasks (dialogue state tracking, question answering, and semantic parsing). For each task, we only have access to a monolingual task-specific model. We calculate the correlation between the metric's ability to predict a good/bad translation with the success/failure on the final task for the Translate-Test setup. Our experiments demonstrate that all metrics exhibit negligible correlation with the extrinsic evaluation of the downstream outcomes. We also find that the scores provided by neural metrics are not interpretable mostly because of undefined ranges. Our analysis suggests that future MT metrics be designed to produce error labels rather than scores to facilitate extrinsic evaluation.

Many state-of-the-art natural language understanding (NLU) models are based on pretrained neural language models. These models often make inferences using information from multiple sources. An important class of such inferences are those that require both background knowledge, presumably contained in a model's pretrained parameters, and instance-specific information that is supplied at inference time. However, the integration and reasoning abilities of NLU models in the presence of multiple knowledge sources have been largely understudied. In this work, we propose a test suite of coreference resolution tasks that require reasoning over multiple facts. Our dataset is organized into subtasks that differ in terms of which knowledge sources contain relevant facts. We evaluate state-of-the-art coreference resolution models on our dataset. Our results indicate that several models struggle to reason on-the-fly over knowledge observed both at pretrain time and at inference time. However, with task-specific training, a subset of models demonstrates the ability to integrate certain knowledge types from multiple sources.

Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is a fundamental problem in computer vision with numerous applications. Recently, LIDAR-supervised methods have achieved remarkable per-pixel depth accuracy in outdoor scenes. However, significant errors are typically found in the proximity of depth discontinuities, i.e., depth edges, which often hinder the performance of depth-dependent applications that are sensitive to such inaccuracies, e.g., novel view synthesis and augmented reality. Since direct supervision for the location of depth edges is typically unavailable in sparse LIDAR-based scenes, encouraging the MDE model to produce correct depth edges is not straightforward. In this work we propose to learn to detect the location of depth edges from densely-supervised synthetic data, and use it to generate supervision for the depth edges in the MDE training. %Despite the 'domain gap' between synthetic and real data, we show that depth edges that are estimated directly are significantly more accurate than the ones that emerge indirectly from the MDE training. To quantitatively evaluate our approach, and due to the lack of depth edges ground truth in LIDAR-based scenes, we manually annotated subsets of the KITTI and the DDAD datasets with depth edges ground truth. We demonstrate significant gains in the accuracy of the depth edges with comparable per-pixel depth accuracy on several challenging datasets.

Detecting personal health mentions on social media is essential to complement existing health surveillance systems. However, annotating data for detecting health mentions at a large scale is a challenging task. This research employs a multitask learning framework to leverage available annotated data from a related task to improve the performance on the main task to detect personal health experiences mentioned in social media texts. Specifically, we focus on incorporating emotional information into our target task by using emotion detection as an auxiliary task. Our approach significantly improves a wide range of personal health mention detection tasks compared to a strong state-of-the-art baseline.

We identify the task of measuring data to quantitatively characterize the composition of machine learning data and datasets. Similar to an object's height, width, and volume, data measurements quantify different attributes of data along common dimensions that support comparison. Several lines of research have proposed what we refer to as measurements, with differing terminology; we bring some of this work together, particularly in fields of computer vision and language, and build from it to motivate measuring data as a critical component of responsible AI development. Measuring data aids in systematically building and analyzing machine learning (ML) data towards specific goals and gaining better control of what modern ML systems will learn. We conclude with a discussion of the many avenues of future work, the limitations of data measurements, and how to leverage these measurement approaches in research and practice.

The health mention classification (HMC) task is the process of identifying and classifying mentions of health-related concepts in text. This can be useful for identifying and tracking the spread of diseases through social media posts. However, this is a non-trivial task. Here we build on recent studies suggesting that using emotional information may improve upon this task. Our study results in a framework for health mention classification that incorporates affective features. We present two methods, an intermediate task fine-tuning approach (implicit) and a multi-feature fusion approach (explicit) to incorporate emotions into our target task of HMC. We evaluated our approach on 5 HMC-related datasets from different social media platforms including three from Twitter, one from Reddit and another from a combination of social media sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach results in statistically significant performance gains on HMC tasks. By using the multi-feature fusion approach, we achieve at least a 3% improvement in F1 score over BERT baselines across all datasets. We also show that considering only negative emotions does not significantly affect performance on the HMC task. Additionally, our results indicate that HMC models infused with emotional knowledge are an effective alternative, especially when other HMC datasets are unavailable for domain-specific fine-tuning. The source code for our models is freely available at https://github.com/tahirlanre/Emotion_PHM.