Motivated by the growing importance of reducing unfairness in ML predictions, Fair-ML researchers have presented an extensive suite of algorithmic 'fairness-enhancing' remedies. Most existing algorithms, however, are agnostic to the sources of the observed unfairness. As a result, the literature currently lacks guiding frameworks to specify conditions under which each algorithmic intervention can potentially alleviate the underpinning cause of unfairness. To close this gap, we scrutinize the underlying biases (e.g., in the training data or design choices) that cause observational unfairness. We present the conceptual idea and a first implementation of a bias-injection sandbox tool to investigate fairness consequences of various biases and assess the effectiveness of algorithmic remedies in the presence of specific types of bias. We call this process the bias(stress)-testing of algorithmic interventions. Unlike existing toolkits, ours provides a controlled environment to counterfactually inject biases in the ML pipeline. This stylized setup offers the distinct capability of testing fairness interventions beyond observational data and against an unbiased benchmark. In particular, we can test whether a given remedy can alleviate the injected bias by comparing the predictions resulting after the intervention in the biased setting with true labels in the unbiased regime-that is, before any bias injection. We illustrate the utility of our toolkit via a proof-of-concept case study on synthetic data. Our empirical analysis showcases the type of insights that can be obtained through our simulations.

在机器学习（ML）算法自动化或提供有关人员的后果决策的环境中，通常会激励个人决策主题以战略性地修改其可观察的属性以获得更有利的预测。结果，对评估规则进行培训的分布可能与其部署中运营的规则不同。尽管这种分配的变化通常可以阻碍准确的预测，但我们的工作确定了由于战略反应而引起的转变相关的独特机会：我们表明我们可以有效地利用战略反应来恢复可观察到的特征与我们希望预测的可观察到的因果关系，即使在没有观察到的混杂变量的情况下。具体而言，我们的工作通过观察到部署模型的序列可以看作是影响代理可观察到的特征但不会直接影响其结果的工具，从而建立了对ML模型的战略响应与仪器变量（IV）回归之间的新颖联系。我们表明，我们的因果恢复方法可用于改善几个重要标准的决策：个人公平，代理结果和预测风险。特别是，我们表明，如果决策主体在修改非毒物属性的能力上有所不同，那么与因果系数偏离的任何决策规则都可能导致（潜在无限）个体级别的不公平性。

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., decrease as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error (from an ontology of 7 types) is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) BUMP enables measuring the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, 3) BUMP enables the measurement of metrics' performance on individual error types and highlights areas of weakness for future work.

Open-textured terms in written rules are typically settled through interpretive argumentation. Ongoing work has attempted to catalogue the schemes used in such interpretive argumentation. But how can the use of these schemes affect the way in which people actually use and reason over the proper interpretations of open-textured terms? Using the interpretive argument-eliciting game Aporia as our framework, we carried out an empirical study to answer this question. Differing from previous work, we did not allow participants to argue for interpretations arbitrarily, but to only use arguments that fit with a given set of interpretive argument templates. Finally, we analyze the results captured by this new dataset, specifically focusing on practical implications for the development of interpretation-capable artificial reasoners.

Calculating an Air Quality Index (AQI) typically uses data streams from air quality sensors deployed at fixed locations and the calculation is a real time process. If one or a number of sensors are broken or offline, then the real time AQI value cannot be computed. Estimating AQI values for some point in the future is a predictive process and uses historical AQI values to train and build models. In this work we focus on gap filling in air quality data where the task is to predict the AQI at 1, 5 and 7 days into the future. The scenario is where one or a number of air, weather and traffic sensors are offline and explores prediction accuracy under such situations. The work is part of the MediaEval'2022 Urban Air: Urban Life and Air Pollution task submitted by the DCU-Insight-AQ team and uses multimodal and crossmodal data consisting of AQI, weather and CCTV traffic images for air pollution prediction.

Micron-scale robots (ubots) have recently shown great promise for emerging medical applications, and accurate control of ubots is a critical next step to deploying them in real systems. In this work, we develop the idea of a nonlinear mismatch controller to compensate for the mismatch between the disturbed unicycle model of a rolling ubot and trajectory data collected during an experiment. We exploit the differential flatness property of the rolling ubot model to generate a mapping from the desired state trajectory to nominal control actions. Due to model mismatch and parameter estimation error, the nominal control actions will not exactly reproduce the desired state trajectory. We employ a Gaussian Process (GP) to learn the model mismatch as a function of the desired control actions, and correct the nominal control actions using a least-squares optimization. We demonstrate the performance of our online learning algorithm in simulation, where we show that the model mismatch makes some desired states unreachable. Finally, we validate our approach in an experiment and show that the error metrics are reduced by up to 40%.

We introduce an unsupervised learning approach that combines the truncated singular value decomposition with convex clustering to estimate within-cluster directions of maximum variance/covariance (in the variables) while simultaneously hierarchically clustering (on observations). In contrast to previous work on joint clustering and embedding, our approach has a straightforward formulation, is readily scalable via distributed optimization, and admits a direct interpretation as hierarchically clustered principal component analysis (PCA) or hierarchically clustered canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Through numerical experiments and real-world examples relevant to precision medicine, we show that our approach outperforms traditional and contemporary clustering methods on underdetermined problems ($p \gg N$ with tens of observations) and scales to large datasets (e.g., $N=100,000$; $p=1,000$) while yielding interpretable dendrograms of hierarchical per-cluster principal components or canonical variates.

As robotic systems continue to address emerging issues in areas such as logistics, mobility, manufacturing, and disaster response, it is increasingly important to rapidly generate safe and energy-efficient trajectories. In this article, we present a new approach to plan energy-optimal trajectories through cluttered environments containing polygonal obstacles. In particular, we develop a method to quickly generate optimal trajectories for a double-integrator system, and we show that optimal path planning reduces to an integer program. To find an efficient solution, we present a distance-informed prefix search to efficiently generate optimal trajectories for a large class of environments. We demonstrate that our approach, while matching the performance of RRT* and Probabilistic Road Maps in terms of path length, outperforms both in terms of energy cost and computational time by up to an order of magnitude. We also demonstrate that our approach yields implementable trajectories in an experiment with a Crazyflie quadrotor.

Governments, industry, and academia have undertaken efforts to identify and mitigate harms in ML-driven systems, with a particular focus on social and ethical risks of ML components in complex sociotechnical systems. However, existing approaches are largely disjointed, ad-hoc and of unknown effectiveness. Systems safety engineering is a well established discipline with a track record of identifying and managing risks in many complex sociotechnical domains. We adopt the natural hypothesis that tools from this domain could serve to enhance risk analyses of ML in its context of use. To test this hypothesis, we apply a "best of breed" systems safety analysis, Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), to a specific high-consequence system with an important ML-driven component, namely the Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) operated by many US States, several of which rely on an ML-derived risk score. We focus in particular on how this analysis can extend to identifying social and ethical risks and developing concrete design-level controls to mitigate them.

在过去的二十年中，对机器人羊群的研究受到了极大的关注。在本文中，我们提出了一种约束驱动的控制算法，该算法可最大程度地减少单个试剂的能耗并产生新兴的V形成。随着代理之间的分散相互作用的形成出现，我们的方法对自发添加或将代理去除为系统是强大的。首先，我们提出了一个分析模型，用于在固定翼无人机后面的尾巴上洗涤，并得出了尾随无人机以最大化其旅行耐力的最佳空气速度。接下来，我们证明，简单地在最佳空速上飞行将永远不会导致新兴的羊群行为，并且我们提出了一种新的分散的“ Anseroid”行为，从而产生出现的V形成。我们用约束驱动的控制算法编码这些行为，该算法最小化每个无人机的机车能力。最后，我们证明，在我们提出的控制法律下，以近似V或eChelon形成初始化的无人机将融合，我们证明了这种出现在模拟和与Crazyflie四肢旋转机队的实验中实时发生。