Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata separates Global North from Global South

Knowledge Graphs have become increasingly popular due to their wide usage in various downstream applications, including information retrieval, chatbot development, language model construction, and many others. Link prediction (LP) is a crucial downstream task for knowledge graphs, as it helps to address the problem of the incompleteness of the knowledge graphs. However, previous research has shown that knowledge graphs, often created in a (semi) automatic manner, are not free from social biases. These biases can have harmful effects on downstream applications, especially by leading to unfair behavior toward minority groups. To understand this issue in detail, we develop a framework -- AuditLP -- deploying fairness metrics to identify biased outcomes in LP, specifically how occupations are classified as either male or female-dominated based on gender as a sensitive attribute. We have experimented with the sensitive attribute of age and observed that occupations are categorized as young-biased, old-biased, and age-neutral. We conduct our experiments on a large number of knowledge triples that belong to 21 different geographies extracted from the open-sourced knowledge graph, Wikidata. Our study shows that the variance in the biased outcomes across geographies neatly mirrors the socio-economic and cultural division of the world, resulting in a transparent partition of the Global North from the Global South.

Streetwise Agents: Empowering Offline RL Policies to Outsmart Exogenous Stochastic Disturbances in RTC

The difficulty of exploring and training online on real production systems limits the scope of real-time online data/feedback-driven decision making. The most feasible approach is to adopt offline reinforcement learning from limited trajectory samples. However, after deployment, such policies fail due to exogenous factors that temporarily or permanently disturb/alter the transition distribution of the assumed decision process structure induced by offline samples. This results in critical policy failures and generalization errors in sensitive domains like Real-Time Communication (RTC). We solve this crucial problem of identifying robust actions in presence of domain shifts due to unseen exogenous stochastic factors in the wild. As it is impossible to learn generalized offline policies within the support of offline data that are robust to these unseen exogenous disturbances, we propose a novel post-deployment shaping of policies (Streetwise), conditioned on real-time characterization of out-of-distribution sub-spaces. This leads to robust actions in bandwidth estimation (BWE) of network bottlenecks in RTC and in standard benchmarks. Our extensive experimental results on BWE and other standard offline RL benchmark environments demonstrate a significant improvement ($\approx$ 18% on some scenarios) in final returns wrt. end-user metrics over state-of-the-art baselines.