Related papers: Beyond Predictive Algorithms in Child Welfare
We study conditional risk minimization (CRM), i.e. the problem of learning a hypothesis of minimal risk for prediction at the next step of sequentially arriving dependent data. Despite it being a fundamental problem, successful learning in…
Reference panel-based estimators have become widely used in genetic prediction of complex traits due to their ability to address data privacy concerns and reduce computational and communication costs. These estimators estimate the…
Recently, recommender system (RS) based on causal inference has gained much attention in the industrial community, as well as the states of the art performance in many prediction and debiasing tasks. Nevertheless, a unified causal analysis…
This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…
Agent memory systems accumulate experience but currently lack a principled operational metric for memory quality governance -- deciding which memories to trust, suppress, or deprecate as the agent's task distribution shifts. Write-time…
The unparalleled ability of machine learning algorithms to learn patterns from data also enables them to incorporate biases embedded within. A biased model can then make decisions that disproportionately harm certain groups in society. Much…
Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of reasoning and generation tasks. However, research studies have shown that LLMs lack the ability to identify causal relationships, a…
Deep learning has demonstrated success in many applications; however, their use in healthcare has been limited due to the lack of transparency into how they generate predictions. Algorithms such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) when…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved tremendous success with their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet also face safety issues similar to those of basic language models. In particular, while algorithms are designed to guide them to…
Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning quality. Traditionally, RMs are trained to rank candidate outputs based on their correctness and coherence.…
When fine-tuning pre-trained Language Models (LMs) to exhibit desired behaviors, maintaining control over risk is critical for ensuring both safety and trustworthiness. Most existing safety alignment methods, such as Safe RLHF and SACPO,…
Causal models communicate our assumptions about causes and effects in real-world phe- nomena. Often the interest lies in the identification of the effect of an action which means deriving an expression from the observed probability…
We study uncertainty quantification for contextual stochastic optimization, focusing on weighted sample average approximation (wSAA), which uses machine-learned relevance weights based on covariates. Although wSAA is widely used for…
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) may suffer from limited scope. In particular, samples may be unrepresentative: some RCTs over- or under- sample individuals with certain characteristics compared to the target population, for which one…
Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
AI-based decision support tools (ADS) are increasingly used to augment human decision-making in high-stakes, social contexts. As public sector agencies begin to adopt ADS, it is critical that we understand workers' experiences with these…
With the current ongoing debate about fairness, explainability and transparency of machine learning models, their application in high-impact clinical decision-making systems must be scrutinized. We consider a real-life example of risk…
Social biases inherent in large language models (LLMs) raise significant fairness concerns. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, which retrieve external knowledge sources to enhance the generative capabilities of LLMs, remain…
Recurrent neural networks are used to forecast time series in finance, climate, language, and from many other domains. Reservoir computers are a particularly easily trainable form of recurrent neural network. Recently, a "next-generation"…