A recent explosion of research focuses on developing methods and tools for building fair predictive models. However, most of this work relies on the assumption that the training and testing data are representative of the target population on which the model will be deployed. However, real-world training data often suffer from selection bias and are not representative of the target population for many reasons, including the cost and feasibility of collecting and labeling data, historical discrimination, and individual biases. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for certifying and ensuring the fairness of predictive models trained on biased data. We take inspiration from query answering over incomplete and inconsistent databases to present and formalize the problem of consistent range approximation (CRA) of answers to queries about aggregate information for the target population. We aim to leverage background knowledge about the data collection process, biased data, and limited or no auxiliary data sources to compute a range of answers for aggregate queries over the target population that are consistent with available information. We then develop methods that use CRA of such aggregate queries to build predictive models that are certifiably fair on the target population even when no external information about that population is available during training. We evaluate our methods on real data and demonstrate improvements over state of the art. Significantly, we show that enforcing fairness using our methods can lead to predictive models that are not only fair, but more accurate on the target population.

随着在敏感应用中广泛使用复杂的机器学习模型，了解他们的决策已成为一项重要任务。对表格数据进行培训的模型在解释其基本决策过程的解释方面取得了重大进展，该过程具有少量的离散功能。但是，将这些方法应用于高维输入（例如图像）并不是一项琐碎的任务。图像由原子水平的像素组成，并不具有任何解释性。在这项工作中，我们试图使用带注释的图像的高级可解释特征来提供解释。我们利用游戏理论的Shapley价值框架，该框架在XAI问题中广泛接受。通过开发一条管道来生成反事实并随后使用它来估计莎普利值，我们获得了具有强大的公理保证的对比度和可解释的解释。

尽管它们的准确性很高，但由于未知的决策过程和潜在的偏见，现代复杂的图像分类器不能被敏感任务受到信任。反事实解释非常有效地为这些黑盒算法提供透明度。然而，生成可能对分类器输出产生一致影响并揭示可解释的特征更改的反事实是一项非常具有挑战性的任务。我们介绍了一种新颖的方法，可以使用验证的生成模型为图像分类器生成因果关系但可解释的反事实解释，而无需进行任何重新训练或调节。该技术中的生成模型不可能在与目标分类器相同的数据上进行训练。我们使用此框架来获得对比度和因果关系，并作为黑盒分类器的全球解释。在面部属性分类的任务上，我们通过提供因果和对比特征属性以及相应的反事实图像来展示不同属性如何影响分类器输出。

在文献中提出了各种各样的公平度量和可解释的人工智能（XAI）方法，以确定在关键现实环境中使用的机器学习模型中的偏差。但是，仅报告模型的偏差，或使用现有XAI技术生成解释不足以定位并最终减轻偏差源。在这项工作中，我们通过识别对这种行为的根本原因的训练数据的连贯子集来引入Gopher，该系统产生紧凑，可解释和意外模型行为的偏差或意外模型行为。具体而言，我们介绍了因果责任的概念，这些责任通过删除或更新其数据集来解决培训数据的程度可以解决偏差。建立在这一概念上，我们开发了一种有效的方法，用于生成解释模型偏差的顶级模式，该模型偏置利用来自ML社区的技术来实现因果责任，并使用修剪规则来管理模式的大搜索空间。我们的实验评估表明了Gopher在为识别和调试偏置来源产生可解释解释时的有效性。

分类，一种重大研究的数据驱动机器学习任务，驱动越来越多的预测系统，涉及批准的人类决策，如贷款批准和犯罪风险评估。然而，分类器经常展示歧视性行为，特别是当呈现有偏置数据时。因此，分类公平已经成为一个高优先级的研究区。数据管理研究显示与数据和算法公平有关的主题的增加和兴趣，包括公平分类的主题。公平分类的跨学科努力，具有最大存在的机器学习研究，导致大量的公平概念和尚未系统地评估和比较的广泛方法。在本文中，我们对13个公平分类方法和额外变种的广泛分析，超越，公平，公平，效率，可扩展性，对数据误差的鲁棒性，对潜在的ML模型，数据效率和使用各种指标的稳定性的敏感性和稳定性现实世界数据集。我们的分析突出了对不同指标的影响的新颖见解和高级方法特征对不同方面的性能方面。我们还讨论了选择适合不同实际设置的方法的一般原则，并确定以数据管理为中心的解决方案可能产生最大影响的区域。

Recently, Smart Video Surveillance (SVS) systems have been receiving more attention among scholars and developers as a substitute for the current passive surveillance systems. These systems are used to make the policing and monitoring systems more efficient and improve public safety. However, the nature of these systems in monitoring the public's daily activities brings different ethical challenges. There are different approaches for addressing privacy issues in implementing the SVS. In this paper, we are focusing on the role of design considering ethical and privacy challenges in SVS. Reviewing four policy protection regulations that generate an overview of best practices for privacy protection, we argue that ethical and privacy concerns could be addressed through four lenses: algorithm, system, model, and data. As an case study, we describe our proposed system and illustrate how our system can create a baseline for designing a privacy perseverance system to deliver safety to society. We used several Artificial Intelligence algorithms, such as object detection, single and multi camera re-identification, action recognition, and anomaly detection, to provide a basic functional system. We also use cloud-native services to implement a smartphone application in order to deliver the outputs to the end users.

In recent years, we have seen a significant interest in data-driven deep learning approaches for video anomaly detection, where an algorithm must determine if specific frames of a video contain abnormal behaviors. However, video anomaly detection is particularly context-specific, and the availability of representative datasets heavily limits real-world accuracy. Additionally, the metrics currently reported by most state-of-the-art methods often do not reflect how well the model will perform in real-world scenarios. In this article, we present the Charlotte Anomaly Dataset (CHAD). CHAD is a high-resolution, multi-camera anomaly dataset in a commercial parking lot setting. In addition to frame-level anomaly labels, CHAD is the first anomaly dataset to include bounding box, identity, and pose annotations for each actor. This is especially beneficial for skeleton-based anomaly detection, which is useful for its lower computational demand in real-world settings. CHAD is also the first anomaly dataset to contain multiple views of the same scene. With four camera views and over 1.15 million frames, CHAD is the largest fully annotated anomaly detection dataset including person annotations, collected from continuous video streams from stationary cameras for smart video surveillance applications. To demonstrate the efficacy of CHAD for training and evaluation, we benchmark two state-of-the-art skeleton-based anomaly detection algorithms on CHAD and provide comprehensive analysis, including both quantitative results and qualitative examination.

Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) are one of the most potent parametric density estimators based on the kernel model that finds application in many scientific domains. In recent years, with the dramatic enlargement of data sources, typical machine learning algorithms, e.g. Expectation Maximization (EM), encounters difficulty with high-dimensional and streaming data. Moreover, complicated densities often demand a large number of Gaussian components. This paper proposes a fast online parameter estimation algorithm for GMM by using first-order stochastic optimization. This approach provides a framework to cope with the challenges of GMM when faced with high-dimensional streaming data and complex densities by leveraging the flexibly-tied factorization of the covariance matrix. A new stochastic Manifold optimization algorithm that preserves the orthogonality is introduced and used along with the well-known Euclidean space numerical optimization. Numerous empirical results on both synthetic and real datasets justify the effectiveness of our proposed stochastic method over EM-based methods in the sense of better-converged maximum for likelihood function, fewer number of needed epochs for convergence, and less time consumption per epoch.

In atomistic simulations of solids, ability to classify crystal phases and lattice defects in the presence of thermal fluctuations is essential for gaining deeper insights into the simulated dynamics. The need for accurate and efficient characterization methods is especially acute in presently emerging large-scale simulations of multi-phase systems far from equilibrium. Taking the perspective that delineating order and disorder features from ubiquitous thermal vibrations is akin to extracting signal from noise, we consider classification of ordered phases and identification of disordered crystal defects to be fundamentally the same problem and address them both with a unified approach: a denoising score function that removes thermal noise and recovers any underlying crystalline order-disorder. Built on a rotationally equivariant graph neural network (NequIP), the denoiser was trained entirely with synthetically noised structures and requires no simulation data during training. To demonstrate its denoising capabilities, the denoiser is shown to effectively remove thermal vibrations of BCC, FCC, and HCP crystal structures without impacting the underlying disordered defects, including point defects, dislocations, grain boundaries, and liquid disorder. In particular the denoiser was applied to two relatively complex MD simulations that present practical challenges: a Cu solidification trajectory involving a polymorphic nucleus, and a trajectory of BCC Ta undergoing plastic deformation resulting in dislocation networks and point defect clusters. In both cases the denoiser facilitates or trivializes the subsequent characterization of the order-disorder features. Lastly, we outline future work to extend our denoising model to more complex crystal structures and to multi-element systems.

People capture photos and videos to relive and share memories of personal significance. Recently, media montages (stories) have become a popular mode of sharing these memories due to their intuitive and powerful storytelling capabilities. However, creating such montages usually involves a lot of manual searches, clicks, and selections that are time-consuming and cumbersome, adversely affecting user experiences. To alleviate this, we propose task-oriented dialogs for montage creation as a novel interactive tool to seamlessly search, compile, and edit montages from a media collection. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to leverage multi-turn conversations for such a challenging application, extending the previous literature studying simple media retrieval tasks. We collect a new dataset C3 (Conversational Content Creation), comprising 10k dialogs conditioned on media montages simulated from a large media collection. We take a simulate-and-paraphrase approach to collect these dialogs to be both cost and time efficient, while drawing from natural language distribution. Our analysis and benchmarking of state-of-the-art language models showcase the multimodal challenges present in the dataset. Lastly, we present a real-world mobile demo application that shows the feasibility of the proposed work in real-world applications. Our code and data will be made publicly available.