With the widespread use of AI systems and applications in our everyday lives, it is important to take fairness issues into consideration while designing and engineering these types of systems. Such systems can be used in many sensitive environments to make important and life-changing decisions; thus, it is crucial to ensure that the decisions do not reflect discriminatory behavior toward certain groups or populations. We have recently seen work in machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning that addresses such challenges in different subdomains. With the commercialization of these systems, researchers are becoming aware of the biases that these applications can contain and have attempted to address them. In this survey we investigated different real-world applications that have shown biases in various ways, and we listed different sources of biases that can affect AI applications. We then created a taxonomy for fairness definitions that machine learning researchers have defined in order to avoid the existing bias in AI systems. In addition to that, we examined different domains and subdomains in AI showing what researchers have observed with regard to unfair outcomes in the state-of-the-art methods and how they have tried to address them. There are still many future directions and solutions that can be taken to mitigate the problem of bias in AI systems. We are hoping that this survey will motivate researchers to tackle these issues in the near future by observing existing work in their respective fields.

A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning

Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning , which drastically reduces the number of task-speciﬁc training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model (PaLM). We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly eﬃcient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued beneﬁts of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the ﬁnetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A signiﬁcant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.

PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways

We present Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding. Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation. Our key discovery is that generic large language models (e.g. T5), pretrained on text-only corpora, are surprisingly effective at encoding text for image synthesis: increasing the size of the language model in Imagen boosts both sample fidelity and image-text alignment much more than increasing the size of the image diffusion model. Imagen achieves a new state-of-the-art FID score of 7.27 on the COCO dataset, without ever training on COCO, and human raters find Imagen samples to be on par with the COCO data itself in image-text alignment. To assess text-to-image models in greater depth, we introduce DrawBench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for text-to-image models. With DrawBench, we compare Imagen with recent methods including VQ-GAN+CLIP, Latent Diffusion Models, and DALL-E 2, and find that human raters prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment. See https://imagen.research.google/ for an overview of the results.

Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding

Large language models, which are often trained for hundreds of thousands of compute days, have shown remarkable capabilities for zero- and few-shot learning. Given their computational cost, these models are difficult to replicate without significant capital. For the few that are available through APIs, no access is granted to the full model weights, making them difficult to study. We present Open Pre-trained Transformers (OPT), a suite of decoder-only pre-trained transformers ranging from 125M to 175B parameters, which we aim to fully and responsibly share with interested researchers. We show that OPT-175B is comparable to GPT-3, while requiring only 1/7th the carbon footprint to develop. We are also releasing our logbook detailing the infrastructure challenges we faced, along with code for experimenting with all of the released models.

OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models

Trained machine learning models are increasingly used to perform high-impact tasks in areas such as law enforcement, medicine, education, and employment. In order to clarify the intended use cases of machine learning models and minimize their usage in contexts for which they are not well suited, we recommend that released models be accompanied by documentation detailing their performance characteristics. In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information. While we focus primarily on human-centered machine learning models in the application fields of computer vision and natural language processing, this framework can be used to document any trained machine learning model. To solidify the concept, we provide cards for two supervised models: One trained to detect smiling faces in images, and one trained to detect toxic comments in text. We propose model cards as a step towards the responsible democratization of machine learning and related AI technology, increasing transparency into how well AI technology works. We hope this work encourages those releasing trained machine learning models to accompany model releases with similar detailed evaluation numbers and other relevant documentation.

Model Cards for Model Reporting

The machine learning community currently has no standardized process for documenting datasets, which can lead to severe consequences in high-stakes domains. To address this gap, we propose datasheets for datasets. In the electronics industry, every component, no matter how simple or complex, is accompanied with a datasheet that describes its operating characteristics, test results, recommended uses, and other information. By analogy, we propose that every dataset be accompanied with a datasheet that documents its motivation, composition, collection process, recommended uses, and so on. Datasheets for datasets will facilitate better communication between dataset creators and dataset consumers, and encourage the machine learning community to prioritize transparency and accountability.

Datasheets for Datasets

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3458723

Datasheets for datasets

“Algorithmic audits” have been embraced as tools to investigate the functioning and consequences of sociotechnical systems. Though the term is used somewhat loosely in the algorithmic context and encompasses a variety of methods, it maintains a close connection to audit studies in the social sciences—which have, for decades, used experimental methods to measure the prevalence of discrimination across domains like housing and employment. In the social sciences, audit studies originated in a strong tradition of social justice and participatory action, often involving collaboration between researchers and communities; but scholars have argued that, over time, social science audits have become somewhat distanced from these original goals and priorities. We draw from this history in order to highlight difficult tensions that have shaped the development of social science audits, and to assess their implications in the context of algorithmic auditing. In doing so, we put forth considerations to assist in the development of robust and engaged assessments of sociotechnical systems that draw from auditing’s roots in racial equity and social justice.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3465416.3483294

Algorithmic Auditing and Social Justice: Lessons from the History of Audit Studies

Algorithmic audits have been embraced as tools to investigate the functioning and consequences of sociotechnical systems. Though the term is used somewhat loosely in the algorithmic context and encompasses a variety of methods, it maintains a close connection to audit studies in the social sciences--which have, for decades, used experimental methods to measure the prevalence of discrimination across domains like housing and employment. In the social sciences, audit studies originated in a strong tradition of social justice and participatory action, often involving collaboration between researchers and communities; but scholars have argued that, over time, social science audits have become somewhat distanced from these original goals and priorities. We draw from this history in order to highlight difficult tensions that have shaped the development of social science audits, and to assess their implications in the context of algorithmic auditing. In doing so, we put forth considerations to assist in the development of robust and engaged assessments of sociotechnical systems that draw from auditing's roots in racial equity and social justice.

Recommender systems are increasingly used to predict and serve content that aligns with user taste, yet the task of matching new users with relevant content remains a challenge. We consider podcasting to be an emerging medium with rapid growth in adoption, and discuss challenges that arise when applying traditional recommendation approaches to address the cold-start problem. Using music consumption behavior, we examine two main techniques in inferring Spotify users preferences over more than 200k podcasts. Our results show significant improvements in consumption of up to 50% for both offline and online experiments. We provide extensive analysis on model performance and examine the degree to which music data as an input source introduces bias in recommendations.

Briana Vecchione

Papers

Datasheets for Datasets

Datasheets for datasets

Algorithmic Auditing and Social Justice: Lessons from the History of Audit Studies

Algorithmic Auditing and Social Justice: Lessons from the History of Audit Studies

Recommending Podcasts for Cold-Start Users Based on Music Listening and Taste