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We articulate fundamental mismatches between technical methods for machine unlearning in Generative AI, and documented aspirations for broader impact that these methods could have for law and policy. These aspirations are both numerous and varied, motivated by issues that pertain to privacy, copyright, safety, and more. For example, unlearning is often invoked as a solution for removing the effects of targeted information from a generative-AI model's parameters, e.g., a particular individual's personal data or in-copyright expression of Spiderman that was included in the model's training data. Unlearning is also proposed as a way to prevent a model from generating targeted types of information in its outputs, e.g., generations that closely resemble a particular individual's data or reflect the concept of "Spiderman." Both of these goals--the targeted removal of information from a model and the targeted suppression of information from a model's outputs--present various technical and substantive challenges. We provide a framework for thinking rigorously about these challenges, which enables us to be clear about why unlearning is not a general-purpose solution for circumscribing generative-AI model behavior in service of broader positive impact. We aim for conceptual clarity and to encourage more thoughtful communication among machine learning (ML), law, and policy experts who seek to develop and apply technical methods for compliance with policy objectives., Comment: Presented at the 2nd Workshop on Generative AI and Law at ICML (July 2024)

Remarkable advancements in modern generative foundation models have enabled the development of sophisticated and highly capable autonomous agents that can observe their environment, invoke tools, and communicate with other agents to solve problems. Although such agents can communicate with users through natural language, their complexity and wide-ranging failure modes present novel challenges for human-AI interaction. Building on prior research and informed by a communication grounding perspective, we contribute to the study of \emph{human-agent communication} by identifying and analyzing twelve key communication challenges that these systems pose. These include challenges in conveying information from the agent to the user, challenges in enabling the user to convey information to the agent, and overarching challenges that need to be considered across all human-agent communication. We illustrate each challenge through concrete examples and identify open directions of research. Our findings provide insights into critical gaps in human-agent communication research and serve as an urgent call for new design patterns, principles, and guidelines to support transparency and control in these systems.

There are few principles or guidelines to ensure evaluations of generative AI (GenAI) models and systems are effective. To help address this gap, we propose a set of general dimensions that capture critical choices involved in GenAI evaluation design. These dimensions include the evaluation setting, the task type, the input source, the interaction style, the duration, the metric type, and the scoring method. By situating GenAI evaluations within these dimensions, we aim to guide decision-making during GenAI evaluation design and provide a structure for comparing different evaluations. We illustrate the utility of the proposed set of general dimensions using two examples: a hypothetical evaluation of the fairness of a GenAI system and three real-world GenAI evaluations of biological threats., Comment: NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Evaluating Evaluations (EvalEval)

Across academia, industry, and government, there is an increasing awareness that the measurement tasks involved in evaluating generative AI (GenAI) systems are especially difficult. We argue that these measurement tasks are highly reminiscent of measurement tasks found throughout the social sciences. With this in mind, we present a framework, grounded in measurement theory from the social sciences, for measuring concepts related to the capabilities, impacts, opportunities, and risks of GenAI systems. The framework distinguishes between four levels: the background concept, the systematized concept, the measurement instrument(s), and the instance-level measurements themselves. This four-level approach differs from the way measurement is typically done in ML, where researchers and practitioners appear to jump straight from background concepts to measurement instruments, with little to no explicit systematization in between. As well as surfacing assumptions, thereby making it easier to understand exactly what the resulting measurements do and do not mean, this framework has two important implications for evaluating evaluations: First, it can enable stakeholders from different worlds to participate in conceptual debates, broadening the expertise involved in evaluating GenAI systems. Second, it brings rigor to operational debates by offering a set of lenses for interrogating the validity of measurement instruments and their resulting measurements., Comment: NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Evaluating Evaluations (EvalEval)

Recent years have witnessed increasing calls for computing researchers to grapple with the societal impacts of their work. Tools such as impact assessments have gained prominence as a method to uncover potential impacts, and a number of publication venues now encourage authors to include an impact statement in their submissions. Despite this push, little is known about the way researchers assess, articulate, and address the potential negative societal impact of their work -- especially in industry settings, where research outcomes are often quickly integrated into products. In addition, while there are nascent efforts to support researchers in this task, there remains a dearth of empirically-informed tools and processes. Through interviews with 25 industry computing researchers across different companies and research areas, we first identify four key factors that influence how they grapple with (or choose not to grapple with) the societal impact of their research. To develop an effective impact assessment template tailored to industry computing researchers' needs, we conduct an iterative co-design process with these 25 industry researchers and an additional 16 researchers and practitioners with prior experience and expertise in reviewing and developing impact assessments or broad responsible computing practices. Through the co-design process, we develop 10 design considerations to facilitate the effective design, development, and adaptation of an impact assessment template for use in industry research settings and beyond, as well as our own ``Societal Impact Assessment'' template with concrete scaffolds. We explore the effectiveness of this template through a user study with 15 industry research interns, revealing both its strengths and limitations. Finally, we discuss the implications for future researchers and organizations seeking to foster more responsible research practices.

Prior research in psychology has found that people's decisions are often inconsistent. An individual's decisions vary across time, and decisions vary even more across people. Inconsistencies have been identified not only in subjective matters, like matters of taste, but also in settings one might expect to be more objective, such as sentencing, job performance evaluations, or real estate appraisals. In our study, we explore whether algorithmic decision aids can be used to moderate the degree of inconsistency in human decision-making in the context of real estate appraisal. In a large-scale human-subject experiment, we study how different forms of algorithmic assistance influence the way that people review and update their estimates of real estate prices. We find that both (i) asking respondents to review their estimates in a series of algorithmically chosen pairwise comparisons and (ii) providing respondents with traditional machine advice are effective strategies for influencing human responses. Compared to simply reviewing initial estimates one by one, the aforementioned strategies lead to (i) a higher propensity to update initial estimates, (ii) a higher accuracy of post-review estimates, and (iii) a higher degree of consistency between the post-review estimates of different respondents. While these effects are more pronounced with traditional machine advice, the approach of reviewing algorithmically chosen pairs can be implemented in a wider range of settings, since it does not require access to ground truth data., Comment: To appear in CSCW 2024

Widely deployed large language models (LLMs) can produce convincing yet incorrect outputs, potentially misleading users who may rely on them as if they were correct. To reduce such overreliance, there have been calls for LLMs to communicate their uncertainty to end users. However, there has been little empirical work examining how users perceive and act upon LLMs' expressions of uncertainty. We explore this question through a large-scale, pre-registered, human-subject experiment (N=404) in which participants answer medical questions with or without access to responses from a fictional LLM-infused search engine. Using both behavioral and self-reported measures, we examine how different natural language expressions of uncertainty impact participants' reliance, trust, and overall task performance. We find that first-person expressions (e.g., "I'm not sure, but...") decrease participants' confidence in the system and tendency to agree with the system's answers, while increasing participants' accuracy. An exploratory analysis suggests that this increase can be attributed to reduced (but not fully eliminated) overreliance on incorrect answers. While we observe similar effects for uncertainty expressed from a general perspective (e.g., "It's not clear, but..."), these effects are weaker and not statistically significant. Our findings suggest that using natural language expressions of uncertainty may be an effective approach for reducing overreliance on LLMs, but that the precise language used matters. This highlights the importance of user testing before deploying LLMs at scale., Comment: Accepted to FAccT 2024. This version includes the appendix

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) are sparking a proliferation of LLM-powered user experiences (UX). In product teams, designers often craft UX to meet user needs, but it is unclear how they engage with LLMs as a novel design material. Through a formative study with 12 designers, we find that designers seek a translational mechanism that enables design requirements to shape and be shaped by LLM behavior, motivating a need for designerly adaptation to facilitate this translation. We then built Canvil, a Figma widget that operationalizes designerly adaptation. We used Canvil as a technology probe in a group-based design study (6 groups, N=17), finding that designers constructively iterated on both adaptation approaches and interface designs to enhance end-user interaction with LLMs. Furthermore, designers identified promising collaborative workflows for designerly adaptation. Our work opens new avenues for processes and tools that foreground designers' user-centered expertise in LLM-powered applications. Canvil is available for public use at https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1277396720888327660.

This paper introduces a no-code, machine-readable documentation framework for open datasets, with a focus on responsible AI (RAI) considerations. The framework aims to improve comprehensibility, and usability of open datasets, facilitating easier discovery and use, better understanding of content and context, and evaluation of dataset quality and accuracy. The proposed framework is designed to streamline the evaluation of datasets, helping researchers, data scientists, and other open data users quickly identify datasets that meet their needs and organizational policies or regulations. The paper also discusses the implementation of the framework and provides recommendations to maximize its potential. The framework is expected to enhance the quality and reliability of data used in research and decision-making, fostering the development of more responsible and trustworthy AI systems.

We present the NeurIPS 2021 consistency experiment, a larger-scale variant of the 2014 NeurIPS experiment in which 10% of conference submissions were reviewed by two independent committees to quantify the randomness in the review process. We observe that the two committees disagree on their accept/reject recommendations for 23% of the papers and that, consistent with the results from 2014, approximately half of the list of accepted papers would change if the review process were randomly rerun. Our analysis suggests that making the conference more selective would increase the arbitrariness of the process. Taken together with previous research, our results highlight the inherent difficulty of objectively measuring the quality of research, and suggest that authors should not be excessively discouraged by rejected work.

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) brings about tremendous opportunities for innovation but also looming risks for individuals and society at large. We have reached a pivotal moment for ensuring that LLMs and LLM-infused applications are developed and deployed responsibly. However, a central pillar of responsible AI -- transparency -- is largely missing from the current discourse around LLMs. It is paramount to pursue new approaches to provide transparency for LLMs, and years of research at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction (HCI) highlight that we must do so with a human-centered perspective: Transparency is fundamentally about supporting appropriate human understanding, and this understanding is sought by different stakeholders with different goals in different contexts. In this new era of LLMs, we must develop and design approaches to transparency by considering the needs of stakeholders in the emerging LLM ecosystem, the novel types of LLM-infused applications being built, and the new usage patterns and challenges around LLMs, all while building on lessons learned about how people process, interact with, and make use of information. We reflect on the unique challenges that arise in providing transparency for LLMs, along with lessons learned from HCI and responsible AI research that has taken a human-centered perspective on AI transparency. We then lay out four common approaches that the community has taken to achieve transparency -- model reporting, publishing evaluation results, providing explanations, and communicating uncertainty -- and call out open questions around how these approaches may or may not be applied to LLMs. We hope this provides a starting point for discussion and a useful roadmap for future research.

Machine learning (ML) recourse techniques are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, providing end users with actions to alter ML predictions, but they assume ML developers understand what input variables can be changed. However, a recourse plan's actionability is subjective and unlikely to match developers' expectations completely. We present GAM Coach, a novel open-source system that adapts integer linear programming to generate customizable counterfactual explanations for Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), and leverages interactive visualizations to enable end users to iteratively generate recourse plans meeting their needs. A quantitative user study with 41 participants shows our tool is usable and useful, and users prefer personalized recourse plans over generic plans. Through a log analysis, we explore how users discover satisfactory recourse plans, and provide empirical evidence that transparency can lead to more opportunities for everyday users to discover counterintuitive patterns in ML models. GAM Coach is available at: https://poloclub.github.io/gam-coach/., Comment: Accepted to CHI 2023. 20 pages, 12 figures. For a demo video, see https://youtu.be/ubacP34H9XE. For a live demo, visit https://poloclub.github.io/gam-coach/

Despite the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI), designing user experiences (UX) for AI-powered systems remains challenging. UX designers face hurdles understanding AI technologies, such as pre-trained language models, as design materials. This limits their ability to ideate and make decisions about whether, where, and how to use AI. To address this problem, we bridge the literature on AI design and AI transparency to explore whether and how frameworks for transparent model reporting can support design ideation with pre-trained models. By interviewing 23 UX practitioners, we find that practitioners frequently work with pre-trained models, but lack support for UX-led ideation. Through a scenario-based design task, we identify common goals that designers seek model understanding for and pinpoint their model transparency information needs. Our study highlights the pivotal role that UX designers can play in Responsible AI and calls for supporting their understanding of AI limitations through model transparency and interrogation., Comment: Accepted at ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023)

Large-scale generative models enabled the development of AI-powered code completion tools to assist programmers in writing code. However, much like other AI-powered tools, AI-powered code completions are not always accurate, potentially introducing bugs or even security vulnerabilities into code if not properly detected and corrected by a human programmer. One technique that has been proposed and implemented to help programmers identify potential errors is to highlight uncertain tokens. However, there have been no empirical studies exploring the effectiveness of this technique -- nor investigating the different and not-yet-agreed-upon notions of uncertainty in the context of generative models. We explore the question of whether conveying information about uncertainty enables programmers to more quickly and accurately produce code when collaborating with an AI-powered code completion tool, and if so, what measure of uncertainty best fits programmers' needs. Through a mixed-methods study with 30 programmers, we compare three conditions: providing the AI system's code completion alone, highlighting tokens with the lowest likelihood of being generated by the underlying generative model, and highlighting tokens with the highest predicted likelihood of being edited by a programmer. We find that highlighting tokens with the highest predicted likelihood of being edited leads to faster task completion and more targeted edits, and is subjectively preferred by study participants. In contrast, highlighting tokens according to their probability of being generated does not provide any benefit over the baseline with no highlighting. We further explore the design space of how to convey uncertainty in AI-powered code completion tools, and find that programmers prefer highlights that are granular, informative, interpretable, and not overwhelming., Comment: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 2024

AI explanations are often mentioned as a way to improve human-AI decision-making, but empirical studies have not found consistent evidence of explanations' effectiveness and, on the contrary, suggest that they can increase overreliance when the AI system is wrong. While many factors may affect reliance on AI support, one important factor is how decision-makers reconcile their own intuition -- beliefs or heuristics, based on prior knowledge, experience, or pattern recognition, used to make judgments -- with the information provided by the AI system to determine when to override AI predictions. We conduct a think-aloud, mixed-methods study with two explanation types (feature- and example-based) for two prediction tasks to explore how decision-makers' intuition affects their use of AI predictions and explanations, and ultimately their choice of when to rely on AI. Our results identify three types of intuition involved in reasoning about AI predictions and explanations: intuition about the task outcome, features, and AI limitations. Building on these, we summarize three observed pathways for decision-makers to apply their own intuition and override AI predictions. We use these pathways to explain why (1) the feature-based explanations we used did not improve participants' decision outcomes and increased their overreliance on AI, and (2) the example-based explanations we used improved decision-makers' performance over feature-based explanations and helped achieve complementary human-AI performance. Overall, our work identifies directions for further development of AI decision-support systems and explanation methods that help decision-makers effectively apply their intuition to achieve appropriate reliance on AI., Comment: To appear in CSCW 2023

How do author perceptions match up to the outcomes of the peer-review process and perceptions of others? In a top-tier computer science conference (NeurIPS 2021) with more than 23,000 submitting authors and 9,000 submitted papers, we survey the authors on three questions: (i) their predicted probability of acceptance for each of their papers, (ii) their perceived ranking of their own papers based on scientific contribution, and (iii) the change in their perception about their own papers after seeing the reviews. The salient results are: (1) Authors have roughly a three-fold overestimate of the acceptance probability of their papers: The median prediction is 70% for an approximately 25% acceptance rate. (2) Female authors exhibit a marginally higher (statistically significant) miscalibration than male authors; predictions of authors invited to serve as meta-reviewers or reviewers are similarly calibrated, but better than authors who were not invited to review. (3) Authors' relative ranking of scientific contribution of two submissions they made generally agree (93%) with their predicted acceptance probabilities, but there is a notable 7% responses where authors think their better paper will face a worse outcome. (4) The author-provided rankings disagreed with the peer-review decisions about a third of the time; when co-authors ranked their jointly authored papers, co-authors disagreed at a similar rate -- about a third of the time. (5) At least 30% of respondents of both accepted and rejected papers said that their perception of their own paper improved after the review process. The stakeholders in peer review should take these findings into account in setting their expectations from peer review.

We propose a method to identify and characterize distribution shifts in classification datasets based on optimal transport. It allows the user to identify the extent to which each class is affected by the shift, and retrieves corresponding pairs of samples to provide insights on its nature. We illustrate its use on synthetic and natural shift examples. While the results we present are preliminary, we hope that this inspires future work on interpretable methods for analyzing distribution shifts., Comment: Presented at ICML 2022 DataPerf Workshop

Machine learning (ML) interpretability techniques can reveal undesirable patterns in data that models exploit to make predictions--potentially causing harms once deployed. However, how to take action to address these patterns is not always clear. In a collaboration between ML and human-computer interaction researchers, physicians, and data scientists, we develop GAM Changer, the first interactive system to help domain experts and data scientists easily and responsibly edit Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) and fix problematic patterns. With novel interaction techniques, our tool puts interpretability into action--empowering users to analyze, validate, and align model behaviors with their knowledge and values. Physicians have started to use our tool to investigate and fix pneumonia and sepsis risk prediction models, and an evaluation with 7 data scientists working in diverse domains highlights that our tool is easy to use, meets their model editing needs, and fits into their current workflows. Built with modern web technologies, our tool runs locally in users' web browsers or computational notebooks, lowering the barrier to use. GAM Changer is available at the following public demo link: https://interpret.ml/gam-changer., Comment: Accepted at KDD 2022. 11 pages, 19 figures. For a demo video, see https://youtu.be/D6whtfInqTc. For a live demo, visit https://interpret.ml/gam-changer

Data is central to the development and evaluation of machine learning (ML) models. However, the use of problematic or inappropriate datasets can result in harms when the resulting models are deployed. To encourage responsible AI practice through more deliberate reflection on datasets and transparency around the processes by which they are created, researchers and practitioners have begun to advocate for increased data documentation and have proposed several data documentation frameworks. However, there is little research on whether these data documentation frameworks meet the needs of ML practitioners, who both create and consume datasets. To address this gap, we set out to understand ML practitioners' data documentation perceptions, needs, challenges, and desiderata, with the goal of deriving design requirements that can inform future data documentation frameworks. We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with 14 ML practitioners at a single large, international technology company. We had them answer a list of questions taken from datasheets for datasets (Gebru, 2021). Our findings show that current approaches to data documentation are largely ad hoc and myopic in nature. Participants expressed needs for data documentation frameworks to be adaptable to their contexts, integrated into their existing tools and workflows, and automated wherever possible. Despite the fact that data documentation frameworks are often motivated from the perspective of responsible AI, participants did not make the connection between the questions that they were asked to answer and their responsible AI implications. In addition, participants often had difficulties prioritizing the needs of dataset consumers and providing information that someone unfamiliar with their datasets might need to know. Based on these findings, we derive seven design requirements for future data documentation frameworks., Comment: Camera-ready preprint of paper accepted to CSCW 2022

Transparency around limitations can improve the scientific rigor of research, help ensure appropriate interpretation of research findings, and make research claims more credible. Despite these benefits, the machine learning (ML) research community lacks well-developed norms around disclosing and discussing limitations. To address this gap, we conduct an iterative design process with 30 ML and ML-adjacent researchers to develop and test REAL ML, a set of guided activities to help ML researchers recognize, explore, and articulate the limitations of their research. Using a three-stage interview and survey study, we identify ML researchers' perceptions of limitations, as well as the challenges they face when recognizing, exploring, and articulating limitations. We develop REAL ML to address some of these practical challenges, and highlight additional cultural challenges that will require broader shifts in community norms to address. We hope our study and REAL ML help move the ML research community toward more active and appropriate engagement with limitations., Comment: This work appears in the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22)

Various tools and practices have been developed to support practitioners in identifying, assessing, and mitigating fairness-related harms caused by AI systems. However, prior research has highlighted gaps between the intended design of these tools and practices and their use within particular contexts, including gaps caused by the role that organizational factors play in shaping fairness work. In this paper, we investigate these gaps for one such practice: disaggregated evaluations of AI systems, intended to uncover performance disparities between demographic groups. By conducting semi-structured interviews and structured workshops with thirty-three AI practitioners from ten teams at three technology companies, we identify practitioners' processes, challenges, and needs for support when designing disaggregated evaluations. We find that practitioners face challenges when choosing performance metrics, identifying the most relevant direct stakeholders and demographic groups on which to focus, and collecting datasets with which to conduct disaggregated evaluations. More generally, we identify impacts on fairness work stemming from a lack of engagement with direct stakeholders or domain experts, business imperatives that prioritize customers over marginalized groups, and the drive to deploy AI systems at scale., Comment: Camera-ready preprint of paper accepted to the CSCW conference

Recent strides in interpretable machine learning (ML) research reveal that models exploit undesirable patterns in the data to make predictions, which potentially causes harms in deployment. However, it is unclear how we can fix these models. We present our ongoing work, GAM Changer, an open-source interactive system to help data scientists and domain experts easily and responsibly edit their Generalized Additive Models (GAMs). With novel visualization techniques, our tool puts interpretability into action -- empowering human users to analyze, validate, and align model behaviors with their knowledge and values. Built using modern web technologies, our tool runs locally in users' computational notebooks or web browsers without requiring extra compute resources, lowering the barrier to creating more responsible ML models. GAM Changer is available at https://interpret.ml/gam-changer., Comment: 7 pages, 15 figures, accepted to the Research2Clinics workshop at NeurIPS 2021. For a demo video, see https://youtu.be/2gVSoPoSeJ8. For a live demo, visit https://interpret.ml/gam-changer/

We take inspiration from the study of human explanation to inform the design and evaluation of interpretability methods in machine learning. First, we survey the literature on human explanation in philosophy, cognitive science, and the social sciences, and propose a list of design principles for machine-generated explanations that are meaningful to humans. Using the concept of weight of evidence from information theory, we develop a method for generating explanations that adhere to these principles. We show that this method can be adapted to handle high-dimensional, multi-class settings, yielding a flexible framework for generating explanations. We demonstrate that these explanations can be estimated accurately from finite samples and are robust to small perturbations of the inputs. We also evaluate our method through a qualitative user study with machine learning practitioners, where we observe that the resulting explanations are usable despite some participants struggling with background concepts like prior class probabilities. Finally, we conclude by surfacing~design~implications for interpretability tools in general., Comment: HCOMP 2021

Disaggregated evaluations of AI systems, in which system performance is assessed and reported separately for different groups of people, are conceptually simple. However, their design involves a variety of choices. Some of these choices influence the results that will be obtained, and thus the conclusions that can be drawn; others influence the impacts -- both beneficial and harmful -- that a disaggregated evaluation will have on people, including the people whose data is used to conduct the evaluation. We argue that a deeper understanding of these choices will enable researchers and practitioners to design careful and conclusive disaggregated evaluations. We also argue that better documentation of these choices, along with the underlying considerations and tradeoffs that have been made, will help others when interpreting an evaluation's results and conclusions.

We initiate the study of incentive-compatible forecasting competitions in which multiple forecasters make predictions about one or more events and compete for a single prize. We have two objectives: (1) to incentivize forecasters to report truthfully and (2) to award the prize to the most accurate forecaster. Proper scoring rules incentivize truthful reporting if all forecasters are paid according to their scores. However, incentives become distorted if only the best-scoring forecaster wins a prize, since forecasters can often increase their probability of having the highest score by reporting more extreme beliefs. In this paper, we introduce two novel forecasting competition mechanisms. Our first mechanism is incentive compatible and guaranteed to select the most accurate forecaster with probability higher than any other forecaster. Moreover, we show that in the standard single-event, two-forecaster setting and under mild technical conditions, no other incentive-compatible mechanism selects the most accurate forecaster with higher probability. Our second mechanism is incentive compatible when forecasters' beliefs are such that information about one event does not lead to belief updates on other events, and it selects the best forecaster with probability approaching 1 as the number of events grows. Our notion of incentive compatibility is more general than previous definitions of dominant strategy incentive compatibility in that it allows for reports to be correlated with the event outcomes. Moreover, our mechanisms are easy to implement and can be generalized to the related problems of outputting a ranking over forecasters and hiring a forecaster with high accuracy on future events., Comment: 38 pages. Relative to the previous version Appendix A and Theorem 5 are new. This version additionally contains some expanded exposition

Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems: crowdsourcing systems, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis, to name a few. These systems share the common feature that humans are active participants, making choices that determine the input to, and therefore the output of, the system. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between machine and human, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. The term social computing is often used as a synonym for several related areas, such as "human computation" and subsets of "collective intelligence"; we use it in its broadest sense to encompass all of these things. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area of its own, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, and other social sciences. Yet a broad mathematical foundation for social computing is yet to be established, with a plethora of under-explored opportunities for mathematical research to impact social computing. As in other fields, there is great potential for mathematical work to influence and shape the future of social computing. However, we are far from having the systematic and principled understanding of the advantages, limitations, and potentials of social computing required to match the impact on applications that has occurred in other fields. In June 2015, we brought together roughly 25 experts in related fields to discuss the promise and challenges of establishing mathematical foundations for social computing. This document captures several of the key ideas discussed., Comment: A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshop report, 15 pages

Online learning algorithms, widely used to power search and content optimization on the web, must balance exploration and exploitation, potentially sacrificing the experience of current users in order to gain information that will lead to better decisions in the future. While necessary in the worst case, explicit exploration has a number of disadvantages compared to the greedy algorithm that always "exploits" by choosing an action that currently looks optimal. We ask under what conditions inherent diversity in the data makes explicit exploration unnecessary. We build on a recent line of work on the smoothed analysis of the greedy algorithm in the linear contextual bandits model. We improve on prior results to show that a greedy approach almost matches the best possible Bayesian regret rate of any other algorithm on the same problem instance whenever the diversity conditions hold, and that this regret is at most $\tilde O(T^{1/3})$., Comment: Results in this paper, without any proofs, have been announced in an extended abstract (Raghavan et al., 2018a), and fleshed out in the technical report (Raghavan et al., 2018b [arXiv:1806.00543]). This manuscript covers a subset of results from Raghavan et al. (2018a,b), focusing on the greedy algorithm, and is streamlined accordingly

We study online learning settings in which experts act strategically to maximize their influence on the learning algorithm's predictions by potentially misreporting their beliefs about a sequence of binary events. Our goal is twofold. First, we want the learning algorithm to be no-regret with respect to the best fixed expert in hindsight. Second, we want incentive compatibility, a guarantee that each expert's best strategy is to report his true beliefs about the realization of each event. To achieve this goal, we build on the literature on wagering mechanisms, a type of multi-agent scoring rule. We provide algorithms that achieve no regret and incentive compatibility for myopic experts for both the full and partial information settings. In experiments on datasets from FiveThirtyEight, our algorithms have regret comparable to classic no-regret algorithms, which are not incentive-compatible. Finally, we identify an incentive-compatible algorithm for forward-looking strategic agents that exhibits diminishing regret in practice., Comment: Appears in ICML2020

Interpretability is an elusive but highly sought-after characteristic of modern machine learning methods. Recent work has focused on interpretability via $\textit{explanations}$, which justify individual model predictions. In this work, we take a step towards reconciling machine explanations with those that humans produce and prefer by taking inspiration from the study of explanation in philosophy, cognitive science, and the social sciences. We identify key aspects in which these human explanations differ from current machine explanations, distill them into a list of desiderata, and formalize them into a framework via the notion of $\textit{weight of evidence}$ from information theory. Finally, we instantiate this framework in two simple applications and show it produces intuitive and comprehensible explanations., Comment: Human-Centric Machine Learning (HCML) Workshop @ NeurIPS 2019

AI technologies have the potential to dramatically impact the lives of people with disabilities (PWD). Indeed, improving the lives of PWD is a motivator for many state-of-the-art AI systems, such as automated speech recognition tools that can caption videos for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, or language prediction algorithms that can augment communication for people with speech or cognitive disabilities. However, widely deployed AI systems may not work properly for PWD, or worse, may actively discriminate against them. These considerations regarding fairness in AI for PWD have thus far received little attention. In this position paper, we identify potential areas of concern regarding how several AI technology categories may impact particular disability constituencies if care is not taken in their design, development, and testing. We intend for this risk assessment of how various classes of AI might interact with various classes of disability to provide a roadmap for future research that is needed to gather data, test these hypotheses, and build more inclusive algorithms., Comment: ACM ASSETS 2019 Workshop on AI Fairness for People with Disabilities

We consider a participatory budgeting problem in which each voter submits a proposal for how to divide a single divisible resource (such as money or time) among several possible alternatives (such as public projects or activities) and these proposals must be aggregated into a single aggregate division. Under $\ell_1$ preferences -- for which a voter's disutility is given by the $\ell_1$ distance between the aggregate division and the division he or she most prefers -- the social welfare-maximizing mechanism, which minimizes the average $\ell_1$ distance between the outcome and each voter's proposal, is incentive compatible (Goel et al. 2016). However, it fails to satisfy the natural fairness notion of proportionality, placing too much weight on majority preferences. Leveraging a connection between market prices and the generalized median rules of Moulin (1980), we introduce the independent markets mechanism, which is both incentive compatible and proportional. We unify the social welfare-maximizing mechanism and the independent markets mechanism by defining a broad class of moving phantom mechanisms that includes both. We show that every moving phantom mechanism is incentive compatible. Finally, we characterize the social welfare-maximizing mechanism as the unique Pareto-optimal mechanism in this class, suggesting an inherent tradeoff between Pareto optimality and proportionality., Comment: 28 pages, final journal version