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Adversarial examples are inputs to a machine learning system that result in an incorrect output from that system. Attacks launched through this type of input can cause severe consequences: for example, in the field of image recognition, a…

Positive-Unlabelled (PU) learning is a growing area of machine learning that aims to learn classifiers from data consisting of labelled positive and unlabelled instances. Whilst much work has been done proposing methods for PU learning,…

The history of science and technology shows that seemingly innocuous developments in scientific theories and research have enabled real-world applications with significant negative consequences for humanity. In order to ensure that the…

Machine learning systems can help humans to make decisions by providing decision suggestions (i.e., a label for a datapoint). However, individual datapoints do not always provide enough clear evidence to make confident suggestions. Although…

Machine learning is a tool for building models that accurately represent input training data. When undesired biases concerning demographic groups are in the training data, well-trained models will reflect those biases. We present a…

Motivated by applications in protein function prediction, we consider a challenging supervised classification setting in which positive labels are scarce and there are no explicit negative labels. The learning algorithm must thus select…

Machine learning currently exerts an outsized influence on the world, increasingly affecting institutional practices and impacted communities. It is therefore critical that we question vague conceptions of the field as value-neutral or…

Negative sampling has emerged as an effective technique that enables deep learning models to learn better representations by introducing the paradigm of learn-to-compare. The goal of this approach is to add robustness to deep learning…

Ranking consistently emerges as a primary focus in information retrieval research. Retrieval and ranking models serve as the foundation for numerous applications, including web search, open domain QA, enterprise domain QA, and text-based…

People learn to discriminate between classes without explicit exposure to negative examples. On the contrary, traditional machine learning algorithms often rely on negative examples, otherwise the model would be prone to collapse and…

Public AI benchmark results are widely broadcast by model developers as indicators of model quality within a growing and competitive market. However, these advertised scores do not necessarily reflect the traits of interest to those who…

Machine learning research increasingly bifurcates into two disconnected modes: benchmark-driven engineering that prioritizes metrics over understanding, and idealized theory that often fails to transfer to modern systems. In this position…

The binary classification problem has a situation where only biased data are observed in one of the classes. In this paper, we propose a new method to approach the positive and biased negative (PbN) classification problem, which is a weakly…

We develop a simple model of the scientific peer review process, in which authors of varying ability invest to produce papers of varying quality, and journals evaluate papers based on a noisy signal, choosing to accept or reject each paper.…

Causal machine learning has the potential to revolutionize decision-making by combining the predictive power of machine learning algorithms with the theory of causal inference. However, these methods remain underutilized by the broader…

Traditional evaluation of information access systems has focused primarily on average utility across a set of information needs (information retrieval) or users (recommender systems). In this work, we argue that evaluating only with average…

Missing values are prevalent across various fields, posing challenges for training and deploying predictive models. In this context, imputation is a common practice, driven by the hope that accurate imputations will enhance predictions.…

Reliable evaluation protocols are of utmost importance for reproducible NLP research. In this work, we show that sometimes neither metric nor conventional human evaluation is sufficient to draw conclusions about system performance. Using…

Weak-label learning is a challenging task that requires learning from data "bags" containing positive and negative instances, but only the bag labels are known. The pool of negative instances is usually larger than positive instances, thus…

Machine learning algorithms for prediction are increasingly being used in critical decisions affecting human lives. Various fairness formalizations, with no firm consensus yet, are employed to prevent such algorithms from systematically…