Publications by Type: Conference Proceedings

Predictive algorithms are often trained by optimizing some loss function, to which regularization functions are added to impose a penalty for violating constraints. As expected, the addition of such regularization functions can change the minimizer of the objective. It is not well-understood which regularizers change the minimizer of the loss, and, when the minimizer does change, how it changes. We use property elicitation to take first steps towards understanding the joint relationship between the loss, regularization functions, and the optimal decision for a given problem instance. In particular, we give a necessary and sufficient condition on loss and regularizer pairs for when a property changes with the addition of the regularizer, and examine some commonly used regularizers satisfying this condition from the fair machine learning literature. We empirically demonstrate how algorithmic decision-making changes as a function of both data distribution changes and hardness of the constraints.

     As machine learning (ML) models become more widely deployed in high-stakes applications, counterfactual explanations have emerged as key tools for providing actionable model explanations in practice. Despite the growing popularity of counterfactual explanations, a deeper understanding of these explanations is still lacking. In this work, we systematically analyze counterfactual explanations through the lens of adversarial examples. We do so by formalizing the similarities between popular counterfactual explanation and adversarial example generation methods identifying conditions when they are equivalent. We then derive the upper bounds on the distances between the solutions output by counterfactual explanation and adversarial example generation methods, which we validate on several real-world data sets. By establishing these theoretical and empirical similarities between counterfactual explanations and adversarial examples, our work raises fundamental questions about the design and development of existing counterfactual explanation algorithms.

Learning-to-defer is a framework to automatically defer decision-making to a human expert when ML-based decisions are deemed unreliable. Existing learning-to-defer frameworks are not designed for sequential settings. That is, they defer at every instance independently, based on immediate predictions, while ignoring the potential long-term impact of these interventions. As a result, existing frameworks are myopic. Further, they do not defer adaptively, which is crucial when human interventions are costly. In this work, we propose Sequential Learning-to-Defer (SLTD), a framework for learning-to-defer to a domain expert in sequential decision-making settings. Contrary to existing literature, we pose the problem of learning-to-defer as model-based reinforcement learning (RL) to i) account for long-term consequences of ML-based actions using RL and ii) adaptively defer based on the dynamics (model-based). Our proposed framework determines whether to defer (at each time step) by quantifying whether a deferral now will improve the value compared to delaying deferral to the next time step. To quantify the improvement, we account for potential future deferrals. As a result, we learn a pre-emptive deferral policy (i.e. a policy that defers early if using the ML-based policy could worsen long-term outcomes). Our deferral policy is adaptive to the non-stationarity in the dynamics. We demonstrate that adaptive deferral via SLTD provides an improved trade-off between long-term outcomes and deferral frequency on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world data with non-stationary dynamics. Finally, we interpret the deferral decision by decomposing the propagated (long-term) uncertainty around the outcome, to justify the deferral decision.

     Clinical machine learning models experience significantly degraded performance in datasets not seen during training, e.g., new hospitals or populations. Recent developments in domain generalization offer a promising solution to this problem by creating models that learn invariances across environments. In this work, we benchmark the performance of eight domain generalization methods on multi-site clinical time series and medical imaging data. We introduce a framework to induce synthetic but realistic domain shifts and sampling bias to stress-test these methods over existing non-healthcare benchmarks. We find that current domain generalization methods do not consistently achieve significant gains in out-of-distribution performance over empirical risk minimization on real-world medical imaging data, in line with prior work on general imaging datasets. However, a subset of realistic induced-shift scenarios in clinical time series data do exhibit limited performance gains. We characterize these scenarios in detail, and recommend best practices for domain generalization in the clinical setting.

Active screening is a common approach in controlling the spread of recurring infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza. In this approach, health workers periodically select a subset of population for screening. However, given the limited number of health workers, only a small subset of the population can be visited in any given time period. Given the recurrent nature of the disease and rapid spreading, the goal is to minimize the number of infections over a long time horizon. Active screening can be formalized as a sequential combinatorial optimization over the network of people and their connections. The main computational challenges in this formalization arise from i) the combinatorial nature of the problem, ii) the need of sequential planning and iii) the uncertainties in the infectiousness states of the population.

We present a new algorithm and theoretical results for solving Multi-action Multi-armed Restless Bandits, an important but insufficiently studied generalization of traditional Multi-armed Restless Bandits (MARBs). Multi-action MARBs are capable of handling critical problem complexities often present in AI4SG domains like anti-poaching and healthcare, but that traditional MARBs fail to capture. Limited previous work on Multi-action MARBs has only been specialized to sub-problems. Here we derive BLam, an algorithm for general Multi-action MARBs using Lagrangian relaxation techniques and convexity to quickly converge to good policies via bound optimization. We also provide experimental results comparing BLam to baselines on a simulated distributions motivated by a real-world community health intervention task, achieving up to five-times speedups over more general methods without sacrificing performance.

Detection of burn marks due to wildfires in inaccessible rain forests is important for various disaster management and ecological studies. The fragmented nature of arable landscapes and diverse cropping patterns often thwart the precise mapping of burn scars. Recent advances in remote-sensing and availability of multimodal data offer a viable solution to this mapping problem. However, the task to segment burn marks is difficult because of its indistinguishably with similar looking land patterns, severe fragmented nature of burn marks and partially labelled noisy datasets. In this work we present AmazonNET – a convolutional based network that allows extracting of burn patters from multimodal remote sensing images. The network consists of UNet- a well-known encoder decoder type of architecture with skip connections. The proposed framework utilises stacked RGB-NIR channels to segment burn scars from the pastures by training on a new weakly labelled noisy dataset from Amazonia. Our model illustrates superior performance by correctly identifying partially labelled burn scars and rejecting incorrectly labelled samples, demonstrating our approach as one of the first to effectively utilise deep learning based segmentation models in multimodal burn scar identification.

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