No Arabic abstract
What is a fair performance metric? We consider the choice of fairness metrics through the lens of metric elicitation -- a principled framework for selecting performance metrics that best reflect implicit preferences. The use of metric elicitation enables a practitioner to tune the performance and fairness metrics to the task, context, and population at hand. Specifically, we propose a novel strategy to elicit group-fair performance metrics for multiclass classification problems with multiple sensitive groups that also includes selecting the trade-off between predictive performance and fairness violation. The proposed elicitation strategy requires only relative preference feedback and is robust to both finite sample and feedback noise.
Given a binary prediction problem, which performance metric should the classifier optimize? We address this question by formalizing the problem of Metric Elicitation. The goal of metric elicitation is to discover the performance metric of a practitioner, which reflects her innate rewards (costs) for correct (incorrect) classification. In particular, we focus on eliciting binary classification performance metrics from pairwise feedback, where a practitioner is queried to provide relative preference between two classifiers. By exploiting key geometric properties of the space of confusion matrices, we obtain provably query efficient algorithms for eliciting linear and linear-fractional performance metrics. We further show that our method is robust to feedback and finite sample noise.
Metric elicitation is a recent framework for eliciting performance metrics that best reflect implicit user preferences. This framework enables a practitioner to adjust the performance metrics based on the application, context, and population at hand. However, available elicitation strategies have been limited to linear (or fractional-linear) functions of predictive rates. In this paper, we develop an approach to elicit from a wider range of complex multiclass metrics defined by quadratic functions of rates by exploiting their local linear structure. We apply this strategy to elicit quadratic metrics for group-based fairness, and also discuss how it can be generalized to higher-order polynomials. Our elicitation strategies require only relative preference feedback and are robust to both feedback and finite sample noise.
A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when they see one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration called TINDER, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can reject a given clustering and request a new one, which is chosen to be different from the previous clustering while fitting the data well. We formalize this interaction in a Bayesian framework as a method for prior elicitation, in which each different clustering is produced by a prior distribution that is modified to discourage previously rejected clusterings. We show that TINDER successfully produces a diverse set of clusterings, each of equivalent quality, that are much more diverse than would be obtained by randomized restarts.
A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when she sees one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration, called ciif, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can choose to reject individual clusters and request new ones. The new clusters should be different from previously rejected clusters while still fitting the data well. We formalize this interaction in a novel Bayesian prior elicitation framework. In each iteration, the prior is adapted to account for all the previous feedback, and a new clustering is then produced from the posterior distribution. To achieve the computational efficiency necessary for an interactive setting, we propose an incremental optimization method over data minibatches using Lagrangian relaxation. Experiments demonstrate that ciif can produce accurate and diverse clusterings.
The vulnerability to slight input perturbations is a worrying yet intriguing property of deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite many previous works studying the reason behind such adversarial behavior, the relationship between the generalization performance and adversarial behavior of DNNs is still little understood. In this work, we reveal such relation by introducing a metric characterizing the generalization performance of a DNN. The metric can be disentangled into an information-theoretic non-robust component, responsible for adversarial behavior, and a robust component. Then, we show by experiments that current DNNs rely heavily on optimizing the non-robust component in achieving decent performance. We also demonstrate that current state-of-the-art adversarial training algorithms indeed try to robustify the DNNs by preventing them from using the non-robust component to distinguish samples from different categories. Also, based on our findings, we take a step forward and point out the possible direction for achieving decent standard performance and adversarial robustness simultaneously. We believe that our theory could further inspire the community to make more interesting discoveries about the relationship between standard generalization and adversarial generalization of deep learning models.