Related papers: Beyond Ads: Sequential Decision-Making Algorithms …
We formalize sequential decision-making with information acquisition as the probing-augmented user-centric selection (PUCS) framework, where a learner first probes a subset of arms to obtain side information on resources and rewards, and…
Given that Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates our lives, it is critical that we systematically align AI objectives with the goals and values of humans. The human-AI alignment problem stems from the impracticality of…
Advances in data analytics bring with them civil rights implications. Data-driven and algorithmic decision making increasingly determine how businesses target advertisements to consumers, how police departments monitor individuals or…
Workers spend a significant amount of time learning how to make good decisions. Evaluating the efficacy of a given decision, however, can be complicated -- e.g., decision outcomes are often long-term and relate to the original decision in…
As algorithms increasingly take on critical roles in high-stakes areas such as credit scoring, housing, and employment, civil enforcement actions have emerged as a powerful tool for countering potential discrimination. These legal actions…
This position paper offers a framework to think about how to better involve human influence in algorithmic decision-making of contentious public policy issues. Drawing from insights in communication literature, we introduce a…
We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…
Machine Learning explainability techniques have been proposed as a means of `explaining' or interrogating a model in order to understand why a particular decision or prediction has been made. Such an ability is especially important at a…
When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We…
The rise of reinforcement learning (RL) in critical real-world applications demands a fundamental rethinking of privacy in AI systems. Traditional privacy frameworks, designed to protect isolated data points, fall short for sequential…
We present a systematic study of ad blocking - and the associated "arms race" - as a security problem. We model ad blocking as a state space with four states and six state transitions, which correspond to techniques that can be deployed by…
This thesis scrutinizes common assumptions underlying traditional machine learning approaches to fairness in consequential decision making. After challenging the validity of these assumptions in real-world applications, we propose ways to…
In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential…
Machine learning algorithms play an important role in a variety of important decision-making processes, including targeted advertisement displays, home loan approvals, and criminal behavior predictions. Given the far-reaching impact of…
The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is increasingly seeking to emulate business models of the private sector centered in efficiency, cost reduction, and innovation through the adoption of algorithms. These data-driven systems purportedly…
Mechanism design is a central research branch in microeconomics. An effective mechanism can significantly improve performance and efficiency of social decisions under desired objectives, such as to maximize social welfare or to maximize…
Applications of machine learning (ML) to high-stakes policy settings -- such as education, criminal justice, healthcare, and social service delivery -- have grown rapidly in recent years, sparking important conversations about how to ensure…
Algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes domains often involves assigning decisions to agents with incentives to strategically modify their input to the algorithm. In addition to dealing with incentives, in many domains of interest (e.g.…
With the growing processing power of computing systems and the increasing availability of massive datasets, machine learning algorithms have led to major breakthroughs in many different areas. This development has influenced computer…
As an important psychological and social experiment, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) treats the choice to cooperate or defect as an atomic action. We propose to study the behaviors of online learning algorithms in the Iterated…