Defuse: Harnessing Unrestricted Adversarial Examples for Debugging Models Beyond Test Accuracy

We typically compute aggregate statistics on held-out test data to assess the generalization of machine learning models. However, statistics on test data often overstate model generalization, and thus, the performance of deployed machine learning models can be variable and untrustworthy. Motivated by these concerns, we develop methods to automatically discover and correct model errors beyond those available in the data. We propose Defuse, a method that generates novel model misclassifications, categorizes these errors into high-level model bugs, and efficiently labels and fine-tunes on the errors to correct them. To generate misclassified data, we propose an algorithm inspired by adversarial machine learning techniques that uses a generative model to find naturally occurring instances misclassified by a model. Further, we observe that the generative models have regions in their latent space with higher concentrations of misclassifications. We call these regions misclassification regions and find they have several useful properties. Each region contains a specific type of model bug; for instance, a misclassification region for an MNIST classifier contains a style of skinny 6 that the model mistakes as a 1. We can also assign a single label to each region, facilitating low-cost labeling. We propose a method to learn the misclassification regions and use this insight to both categorize errors and correct them. In practice, Defuse finds and corrects novel errors in classifiers. For example, Defuse shows that a high-performance traffic sign classifier mistakes certain 50km/h signs as 80km/h. Defuse corrects the error after fine-tuning while maintaining generalization on the test set.

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning: Scalable Black-box Optimization

Tuning complex machine learning systems is challenging. Machine learning models typically expose a set of hyperparameters, be it regularization, architecture, or optimization parameters, whose careful tuning is critical to achieve good performance. To democratize access to such systems, it is essential to automate this tuning process. This paper presents Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning (AMT), a fully managed system for black-box optimization at scale. AMT finds the best version of a machine learning model by repeatedly training it with different hyperparameter configurations. It leverages either random search or Bayesian optimization to choose the hyperparameter values resulting in the best-performing model, as measured by the metric chosen by the user. AMT can be used with built-in algorithms, custom algorithms, and Amazon SageMaker pre-built containers for machine learning frameworks. We discuss the core functionality, system architecture and our design principles. We also describe some more advanced features provided by AMT, such as automated early stopping and warm-starting, demonstrating their benefits in experiments.

Convergent Algorithms for (Relaxed) Minimax Fairness

We consider a recently introduced framework in which fairness is measured by worst-case outcomes across groups, rather than by the more standard $\textit{difference}$ between group outcomes. In this framework we provide provably convergent $\textit{oracle-efficient}$ learning algorithms (or equivalently, reductions to non-fair learning) for $\textit{minimax group fairness}$. Here the goal is that of minimizing the maximum loss across all groups, rather than equalizing group losses. Our algorithms apply to both regression and classification settings and support both overall error and false positive or false negative rates as the fairness measure of interest. They also support relaxations of the fairness constraints, thus permitting study of the tradeoff between overall accuracy and minimax fairness. We compare the experimental behavior and performance of our algorithms across a variety of fairness-sensitive data sets and show cases in which minimax fairness is strictly and strongly preferable to equal outcome notions, in the sense that equal outcomes can only be obtained by artificially inflating the harm inflicted on some groups compared to what they suffer under the minimax solution.

Fairness-Aware Online Personalization

Decision making in crucial applications such as lending, hiring, and college admissions has witnessed increasing use of algorithmic models and techniques as a result of a confluence of factors such as ubiquitous connectivity, ability to collect, aggregate, and process large amounts of fine-grained data using cloud computing, and ease of access to applying sophisticated machine learning models. Quite often, such applications are powered by search and recommendation systems, which in turn make use of personalized ranking algorithms. At the same time, there is increasing awareness about the ethical and legal challenges posed by the use of such data-driven systems. Researchers and practitioners from different disciplines have recently highlighted the potential for such systems to discriminate against certain population groups, due to biases in the datasets utilized for learning their underlying recommendation models. We present a study of fairness in online personalization settings involving the ranking of individuals. Starting from a fair warm-start machine-learned model, we first demonstrate that online personalization can cause the model to learn to act in an unfair manner if the user is biased in his/her responses. For this purpose, we construct a stylized model for generating training data with potentially biased features as well as potentially biased labels and quantify the extent of bias that is learned by the model when the user responds in a biased manner as in many real-world scenarios. We then formulate the problem of learning personalized models under fairness constraints and present a regularization based approach for mitigating biases in machine learning. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive simulations with different parameter settings. Code: https://github.com/groshanlal/Fairness-Aware-Online-Personalization

LiFT: A Scalable Framework for Measuring Fairness in ML Applications

Many internet applications are powered by machine learned models, which are usually trained on labeled datasets obtained through either implicit / explicit user feedback signals or human judgments. Since societal biases may be present in the generation of such datasets, it is possible for the trained models to be biased, thereby resulting in potential discrimination and harms for disadvantaged groups. Motivated by the need for understanding and addressing algorithmic bias in web-scale ML systems and the limitations of existing fairness toolkits, we present the LinkedIn Fairness Toolkit (LiFT), a framework for scalable computation of fairness metrics as part of large ML systems. We highlight the key requirements in deployed settings, and present the design of our fairness measurement system. We discuss the challenges encountered in incorporating fairness tools in practice and the lessons learned during deployment at LinkedIn. Finally, we provide open problems based on practical experience.

Fair Bayesian Optimization

Given the increasing importance of machine learning (ML) in our lives, algorithmic fairness techniques have been proposed to mitigate biases that can be amplified by ML. Commonly, these specialized techniques apply to a single family of ML models and a specific definition of fairness, limiting their effectiveness in practice. We introduce a general constrained Bayesian optimization (BO) framework to optimize the performance of any ML model while enforcing one or multiple fairness constraints. BO is a global optimization method that has been successfully applied to automatically tune the hyperparameters of ML models. We apply BO with fairness constraints to a range of popular models, including random forests, gradient boosting, and neural networks, showing that we can obtain accurate and fair solutions by acting solely on the hyperparameters. We also show empirically that our approach is competitive with specialized techniques that explicitly enforce fairness constraints during training, and outperforms preprocessing methods that learn unbiased representations of the input data. Moreover, our method can be used in synergy with such specialized fairness techniques to tune their hyperparameters. Finally, we study the relationship between hyperparameters and fairness of the generated model. We observe a correlation between regularization and unbiased models, explaining why acting on the hyperparameters leads to ML models that generalize well and are fair.

Fairness-Aware Ranking in Search & Recommendation Systems with Application to LinkedIn Talent Search

We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary measures to quantify bias with respect to protected attributes such as gender and age. We then present algorithms for computing fairness-aware re-ranking of results. For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or more protected attributes. We show that such a framework can be tailored to achieve fairness criteria such as equality of opportunity and demographic parity depending on the choice of the desired distribution. We evaluate the proposed algorithms via extensive simulations over different parameter choices, and study the effect of fairness-aware ranking on both bias and utility measures. We finally present the online A/B testing results from applying our framework towards representative ranking in LinkedIn Talent Search, and discuss the lessons learned in practice. Our approach resulted in tremendous improvement in the fairness metrics (nearly three fold increase in the number of search queries with representative results) without affecting the business metrics, which paved the way for deployment to 100% of LinkedIn Recruiter users worldwide. Ours is the first large-scale deployed framework for ensuring fairness in the hiring domain, with the potential positive impact for more than 630M LinkedIn members.

What's in a Name? Reducing Bias in Bios without Access to Protected Attributes

There is a growing body of work that proposes methods for mitigating bias in machine learning systems. These methods typically rely on access to protected attributes such as race, gender, or age. However, this raises two significant challenges: (1) protected attributes may not be available or it may not be legal to use them, and (2) it is often desirable to simultaneously consider multiple protected attributes, as well as their intersections. In the context of mitigating bias in occupation classification, we propose a method for discouraging correlation between the predicted probability of an individual's true occupation and a word embedding of their name. This method leverages the societal biases that are encoded in word embeddings, eliminating the need for access to protected attributes. Crucially, it only requires access to individuals' names at training time and not at deployment time. We evaluate two variations of our proposed method using a large-scale dataset of online biographies. We find that both variations simultaneously reduce race and gender biases, with almost no reduction in the classifier's overall true positive rate.