@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/fat/MajumdarV24,

title = {CARMA: A practical framework to generate recommendations for causal  algorithmic recourse at scale},

author = {Ayan Majumdar and Isabel Valera},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3659003},

doi = {10.1145/3630106.3659003},

year  = {2024},

date = {2024-01-01},

urldate = {2024-01-01},

booktitle = {The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 

 FAccT 2024, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 3-6, 2024},

pages = {1745–1762},

publisher = {ACM},

abstract = {Algorithms are increasingly used to automate large-scale decision-making processes, e.g., online platforms that make instant decisions in lending, hiring, and education. When such automated systems yield unfavorable decisions, it is imperative to allow for recourse by accompanying the instantaneous negative decisions with recommendations that can help affected individuals to overturn them. However, the practical challenges of providing algorithmic recourse in large-scale settings are not negligible: giving recourse recommendations that are actionable requires not only causal knowledge of the relationships between applicant features but also solving a complex combinatorial optimization problem for each rejected applicant. In this work, we introduce CARMA, a novel framework to generate causal recourse recommendations at scale. For practical settings with limited causal information, CARMA leverages pre-trained state-of-the-art causal generative models to find recourse recommendations. More importantly, CARMA addresses the scalability of finding these recommendations by casting the complex recourse optimization problem as a prediction task. By training a novel neural-network-based framework, CARMA efficiently solves the prediction task without requiring supervision for optimal recourse actions. Our extensive evaluations show that post-training, running inference on CARMA reliably amortizes causal recourse, generating optimal and instantaneous recommendations. CARMA exhibits flexibility, as its optimization is versatile with respect to the algorithmic decision-making and pre-trained causal generative models, provided their differentiability is ensured. Furthermore, we showcase CARMA in a case study, illustrating its ability to tailor causal recourse recommendations by readily incorporating population-level feature preferences based on factors such as difficulty or time needed.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/aaai/NandaMKDGLW23,

title = {Do Invariances in Deep Neural Networks Align with Human Perception?},

author = {Vedant Nanda and Ayan Majumdar and Camila Kolling and John P. Dickerson and Krishna P. Gummadi and Bradley C. Love and Adrian Weller},

editor = {Brian Williams and Yiling Chen and Jennifer Neville},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i8.26112},

doi = {10.1609/AAAI.V37I8.26112},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

urldate = {2023-01-01},

booktitle = {Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 

 2023, Thirty-Fifth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial 

 Intelligence, IAAI 2023, Thirteenth Symposium on Educational Advances 

 in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2023, Washington, DC, USA, February 

 7-14, 2023},

pages = {9277–9285},

publisher = {AAAI Press},

abstract = {An evaluation criterion for safe and trustworthy deep learning is how well the invariances captured by representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) are shared with humans. We identify challenges in measuring these invariances. Prior works used gradient-based methods to generate identically represented inputs (IRIs), ie, inputs which have identical representations (on a given layer) of a neural network, and thus capture invariances of a given network. One necessary criterion for a network's invariances to align with human perception is for its IRIs look 'similar' to humans. Prior works, however, have mixed takeaways; some argue that later layers of DNNs do not learn human-like invariances yet others seem to indicate otherwise. We argue that the loss function used to generate IRIs can heavily affect takeaways about invariances of the network and is the primary reason for these conflicting findings. We propose an adversarial regularizer on the IRI generation loss that finds IRIs that make any model appear to have very little shared invariance with humans. Based on this evidence, we argue that there is scope for improving models to have human-like invariances, and further, to have meaningful comparisons between models one should use IRIs generated using the regularizer-free loss. We then conduct an in-depth investigation of how different components (eg architectures, training losses, data augmentations) of the deep learning pipeline contribute to learning models that have good alignment with humans. We find that architectures with residual connections trained using a (self-supervised) contrastive loss with l_p ball adversarial data augmentation tend to learn invariances that are most aligned with humans. Code: github.com/nvedant07/Human-NN-Alignment},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/fat/RateikeMMGV22,

title = {Don't Throw it Away! The Utility of Unlabeled Data in Fair Decision  Making},

author = {Miriam Rateike and Ayan Majumdar and Olga Mineeva and Krishna P. Gummadi and Isabel Valera},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533199},

doi = {10.1145/3531146.3533199},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-01-01},

urldate = {2022-01-01},

booktitle = {FAccT '22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and 

 Transparency, Seoul, Republic of Korea, June 21 - 24, 2022},

pages = {1421–1433},

publisher = {ACM},

abstract = {unbiased, i.e., equally distributed across socially salient groups. In many practical settings, the ground-truth cannot be directly observed, and instead, we have to rely on a biased proxy measure of the ground-truth, i.e., biased labels, in the data. In addition, data is often selectively labeled, i.e., even the biased labels are only observed for a small fraction of the data that received a positive decision. To overcome label and selection biases, recent work proposes to learn stochastic, exploring decision policies via i) online training of new policies at each time-step and ii) enforcing fairness as a constraint on performance. However, the existing approach uses only labeled data, disregarding a large amount of unlabeled data, and thereby suffers from high instability and variance in the learned decision policies at different times. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on a variational autoencoder for practical fair decision-making. Our method learns an unbiased data representation leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data and uses the representations to learn a policy in an online process. Using synthetic data, we empirically validate that our method converges to the optimal (fair) policy according to the ground-truth with low variance. In real-world experiments, we further show that our training approach not only offers a more stable learning process but also yields policies with higher fairness as well as utility than previous approaches.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}