Research Papers

Always Lurking: Understanding and Mitigating Bias in Online Human Trafficking Detection

Kyle Hundman, Thamme Gowda, Mayank Kejriwal +1

Web-based human trafficking activity has increased in recent years but it remains sparsely dispersed among escort advertisements and difficult to identify due to its often-latent nature. The use of intelligent systems to detect trafficking can thus have a direct impact on investigative resource allocation and decision-making, and, more broadly, help curb a widespread social problem. Trafficking detection involves assigning a normalized score to a set of escort advertisements crawled from the Web -- a higher score indicates a greater risk of trafficking-related (involuntary) activities. In this paper, we define and study the problem of trafficking detection and present a trafficking detection pipeline architecture developed over three years of research within the DARPA Memex program. Drawing on multi-institutional data, systems, and experiences collected during this time, we also conduct post hoc bias analyses and present a bias mitigation plan. Our findings show that, while automatic trafficking detection is an important application of AI for social good, it also provides cautionary lessons for deploying predictive machine learning algorithms without appropriate de-biasing. This ultimately led to integration of an interpretable solution into a search system that contains over 100 million advertisements and is used by over 200 law enforcement agencies to investigate leads.

The development of Long-CoT reasoning has advanced LLM performance across various tasks, including language understanding, complex problem solving, and code generation. This paradigm enables models to generate intermediate reasoning steps, thereby improving both accuracy and interpretability. However, despite these advancements, a comprehensive understanding of how CoT-based reasoning affects the trustworthiness of language models remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we survey recent work on reasoning models and CoT techniques, focusing on five core dimensions of trustworthy reasoning: truthfulness, safety, robustness, fairness, and privacy. For each aspect, we provide a clear and structured overview of recent studies in chronological order, along with detailed analyses of their methodologies, findings, and limitations. Future research directions are also appended at the end for reference and discussion. Overall, while reasoning techniques hold promise for enhancing model trustworthiness through hallucination mitigation, harmful content detection, and robustness improvement, cutting-edge reasoning models themselves often suffer from comparable or even greater vulnerabilities in safety, robustness, and privacy. By synthesizing these insights, we hope this work serves as a valuable and timely resource for the AI safety community to stay informed on the latest progress in reasoning trustworthiness. A full list of related papers can be found at \href{https://github.com/ybwang119/Awesome-reasoning-safety}{https://github.com/ybwang119/Awesome-reasoning-safety}.

In today's global digital landscape, misinformation transcends linguistic boundaries, posing a significant challenge for moderation systems. Most approaches to misinformation detection are monolingual, focused on high-resource languages, i.e., a handful of world languages that have benefited from substantial research investment. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current research on misinformation detection in low-resource languages, both in monolingual and multilingual settings. We review existing datasets, methodologies, and tools used in these domains, identifying key challenges related to: data resources, model development, cultural and linguistic context, and real-world applications. We examine emerging approaches, such as language-generalizable models and multi-modal techniques, and emphasize the need for improved data collection practices, interdisciplinary collaboration, and stronger incentives for socially responsible AI research. Our findings underscore the importance of systems capable of addressing misinformation across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.

As trustworthy AI continues to advance, the fairness issue in recommendations has received increasing attention. A recommender system is considered unfair when it produces unequal outcomes for different user groups based on user-sensitive attributes (e.g., age, gender). Some researchers have proposed data augmentation-based methods aiming at alleviating user-level unfairness by altering the skewed distribution of training data among various user groups. Despite yielding promising results, they often rely on fairness-related assumptions that may not align with reality, potentially reducing the data quality and negatively affecting model effectiveness. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we study how to implement high-quality data augmentation to improve recommendation fairness. Specifically, we propose FairDgcl, a dynamic graph adversarial contrastive learning framework aiming at improving fairness in recommender system. First, FairDgcl develops an adversarial contrastive network with a view generator and a view discriminator to learn generating fair augmentation strategies in an adversarial style. Then, we propose two dynamic, learnable models to generate contrastive views within contrastive learning framework, which automatically fine-tune the augmentation strategies. Meanwhile, we theoretically show that FairDgcl can simultaneously generate enhanced representations that possess both fairness and accuracy. Lastly, comprehensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FairDgcl.

Exploring Bias and Prediction Metrics to Characterise the Fairness of Machine Learning for Equity-Centered Public Health Decision-Making: A Narrative Review

Shaina Raza, Arash Shaban-Nejad, Elham Dolatabadi +1

Background: The rapid advancement of Machine Learning (ML) represents novel opportunities to enhance public health research, surveillance, and decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of algorithmic bias, systematic errors in predicted population health outcomes, resulting from the public health application of ML. The objective of this narrative review is to explore the types of bias generated by ML and quantitative metrics to assess these biases. Methods : We performed search on PubMed, MEDLINE, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library, Science Direct, and Springer Nature. We used keywords to identify studies describing types of bias and metrics to measure these in the domain of ML and public and population health published in English between 2008 and 2023, inclusive. Results: A total of 72 articles met the inclusion criteria. Our review identified the commonly described types of bias and quantitative metrics to assess these biases from an equity perspective. Conclusion : The review will help formalize the evaluation framework for ML on public health from an equity perspective.

As artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in our society and global economy, AI education and literacy have become necessary components in college and K-12 education to prepare students for an AI-powered society. However, current AI curricula have not yet been made accessible and engaging enough for students and schools from all socio-economic backgrounds with different educational goals. In this work, we developed an open-source learning module for college and high school students, which allows students to build their own robot companion from the ground up. This open platform can be used to provide hands-on experience and introductory knowledge about various aspects of AI, including robotics, machine learning (ML), software engineering, and mechanical engineering. Because of the social and personal nature of a socially assistive robot companion, this module also puts a special emphasis on human-centered AI, enabling students to develop a better understanding of human-AI interaction and AI ethics through hands-on learning activities. With open-source documentation, assembling manuals and affordable materials, students from different socio-economic backgrounds can personalize their learning experience based on their individual educational goals. To evaluate the student-perceived quality of our module, we conducted a usability testing workshop with 15 college students recruited from a minority-serving institution. Our results indicate that our AI module is effective, easy-to-follow, and engaging, and it increases student interest in studying AI/ML and robotics in the future. We hope that this work will contribute toward accessible and engaging AI education in human-AI interaction for college and high school students.

Bias in applications of machine learning (ML) to healthcare is usually attributed to unrepresentative or incomplete data, or to underlying health disparities. This article identifies a more pervasive source of bias that affects the clinical utility of ML-enabled prediction tools: target specification bias. Target specification bias arises when the operationalization of the target variable does not match its definition by decision makers. The mismatch is often subtle, and stems from the fact that decision makers are typically interested in predicting the outcomes of counterfactual, rather than actual, healthcare scenarios. Target specification bias persists independently of data limitations and health disparities. When left uncorrected, it gives rise to an overestimation of predictive accuracy, to inefficient utilization of medical resources, and to suboptimal decisions that can harm patients. Recent work in metrology - the science of measurement - suggests ways of counteracting target specification bias and avoiding its harmful consequences.

A Transfer Learning and Explainable Solution to Detect mpox from Smartphones images

Mattia Giovanni Campana, Marco Colussi, Franca Delmastro +2

In recent months, the monkeypox (mpox) virus -- previously endemic in a limited area of the world -- has started spreading in multiple countries until being declared a ``public health emergency of international concern'' by the World Health Organization. The alert was renewed in February 2023 due to a persisting sustained incidence of the virus in several countries and worries about possible new outbreaks. Low-income countries with inadequate infrastructures for vaccine and testing administration are particularly at risk. A symptom of mpox infection is the appearance of skin rashes and eruptions, which can drive people to seek medical advice. A technology that might help perform a preliminary screening based on the aspect of skin lesions is the use of Machine Learning for image classification. However, to make this technology suitable on a large scale, it should be usable directly on mobile devices of people, with a possible notification to a remote medical expert. In this work, we investigate the adoption of Deep Learning to detect mpox from skin lesion images. The proposal leverages Transfer Learning to cope with the scarce availability of mpox image datasets. As a first step, a homogenous, unpolluted, dataset is produced by manual selection and preprocessing of available image data. It will also be released publicly to researchers in the field. Then, a thorough comparison is conducted amongst several Convolutional Neural Networks, based on a 10-fold stratified cross-validation. The best models are then optimized through quantization for use on mobile devices; measures of classification quality, memory footprint, and processing times validate the feasibility of our proposal. Additionally, the use of eXplainable AI is investigated as a suitable instrument to both technically and clinically validate classification outcomes.

Fairness Evaluation in Text Classification: Machine Learning Practitioner Perspectives of Individual and Group Fairness

Zahra Ashktorab, Benjamin Hoover, Mayank Agarwal +4

Mitigating algorithmic bias is a critical task in the development and deployment of machine learning models. While several toolkits exist to aid machine learning practitioners in addressing fairness issues, little is known about the strategies practitioners employ to evaluate model fairness and what factors influence their assessment, particularly in the context of text classification. Two common approaches of evaluating the fairness of a model are group fairness and individual fairness. We run a study with Machine Learning practitioners (n=24) to understand the strategies used to evaluate models. Metrics presented to practitioners (group vs. individual fairness) impact which models they consider fair. Participants focused on risks associated with underpredicting/overpredicting and model sensitivity relative to identity token manipulations. We discover fairness assessment strategies involving personal experiences or how users form groups of identity tokens to test model fairness. We provide recommendations for interactive tools for evaluating fairness in text classification.

Fairness and bias are crucial concepts in artificial intelligence, yet they are relatively ignored in machine learning applications in clinical psychiatry. We computed fairness metrics and present bias mitigation strategies using a model trained on clinical mental health data. We collected structured data related to the admission, diagnosis, and treatment of patients in the psychiatry department of the University Medical Center Utrecht. We trained a machine learning model to predict future administrations of benzodiazepines on the basis of past data. We found that gender plays an unexpected role in the predictions-this constitutes bias. Using the AI Fairness 360 package, we implemented reweighing and discrimination-aware regularization as bias mitigation strategies, and we explored their implications for model performance. This is the first application of bias exploration and mitigation in a machine learning model trained on real clinical psychiatry data.

With the increasing pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence (AI), many visual analytics tools have been proposed to examine fairness, but they mostly focus on data scientist users. Instead, tackling fairness must be inclusive and involve domain experts with specialized tools and workflows. Thus, domain-specific visualizations are needed for algorithmic fairness. Furthermore, while much work on AI fairness has focused on predictive decisions, less has been done for fair allocation and planning, which require human expertise and iterative design to integrate myriad constraints. We propose the Intelligible Fair Allocation (IF-Alloc) Framework that leverages explanations of causal attribution (Why), contrastive (Why Not) and counterfactual reasoning (What If, How To) to aid domain experts to assess and alleviate unfairness in allocation problems. We apply the framework to fair urban planning for designing cities that provide equal access to amenities and benefits for diverse resident types. Specifically, we propose an interactive visual tool, Intelligible Fair City Planner (IF-City), to help urban planners to perceive inequality across groups, identify and attribute sources of inequality, and mitigate inequality with automatic allocation simulations and constraint-satisfying recommendations. We demonstrate and evaluate the usage and usefulness of IF-City on a real neighborhood in New York City, US, with practicing urban planners from multiple countries, and discuss generalizing our findings, application, and framework to other use cases and applications of fair allocation.

In this study, we conduct a resume-screening experiment (N=528) where people collaborate with simulated AI models exhibiting race-based preferences (bias) to evaluate candidates for 16 high and low status occupations. Simulated AI bias approximates factual and counterfactual estimates of racial bias in real-world AI systems. We investigate people's preferences for White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian candidates (represented through names and affinity groups on quality-controlled resumes) across 1,526 scenarios and measure their unconscious associations between race and status using implicit association tests (IATs), which predict discriminatory hiring decisions but have not been investigated in human-AI collaboration. When making decisions without AI or with AI that exhibits no race-based preferences, people select all candidates at equal rates. However, when interacting with AI favoring a particular group, people also favor those candidates up to 90% of the time, indicating a significant behavioral shift. The likelihood of selecting candidates whose identities do not align with common race-status stereotypes can increase by 13% if people complete an IAT before conducting resume screening. Finally, even if people think AI recommendations are low quality or not important, their decisions are still vulnerable to AI bias under certain circumstances. This work has implications for people's autonomy in AI-HITL scenarios, AI and work, design and evaluation of AI hiring systems, and strategies for mitigating bias in collaborative decision-making tasks. In particular, organizational and regulatory policy should acknowledge the complex nature of AI-HITL decision making when implementing these systems, educating people who use them, and determining which are subject to oversight.