Golnoosh Farnadi

Biography

Golnoosh Farnadi is an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, and an adjunct professor at Université de Montréal. She is a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

Farnadi founded and is a principal investigator of the EQUAL lab at Mila / McGill University. The EQUAL lab (EQuity & EQuality Using AI and Learning algorithms) is a cutting-edge research laboratory dedicated to advancing the fields of algorithmic fairness and responsible AI.

Current Students

PhD - HEC Montréal

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Khaoula Chehbouni

PhD - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Research Intern - McGill University

Alireza Farashah

Master's Research - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Website

prakhar.ganesh@mila.quebec

Marylou Fauchard Fauchard

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Margarida Carvalho

maryfau@icloud.com

Prakhar Ganesh

PhD - McGill University

PhD - McGill University

saber.malekmohammadi@mila.quebec

Saber Malekmohammadi

Research Intern

Armin Moradi

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

arminmoradi785@gmail.com

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Nicola Neophytou

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Elaheh Rahmati

Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal

Reinhardt Sebastian

Research Intern - McGill University University

William St-Arnaud

PhD - Université de Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Margarida Carvalho

Rohan Sukumaran

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Website

Afaf Taïk

Postdoctorate - Université de Montréal

Jesse Thibodeau

Independent visiting researcher - HEC Montréal

Milan Van den Heuvel

Independent visiting researcher - Ghent University

Publications

Understanding the Local Geometry of Generative Model Manifolds

Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun

Ibtihel Amara

Candice Schumann

Mohammad Havaei

Deep generative models learn continuous representations of complex data manifolds using a finite number of samples during training. For a pr… (see more)e-trained generative model, the common way to evaluate the quality of the manifold representation learned, is by computing global metrics like Fr\'echet Inception Distance using a large number of generated and real samples. However, generative model performance is not uniform across the learned manifold, e.g., for \textit{foundation models} like Stable Diffusion generation performance can vary significantly based on the conditioning or initial noise vector being denoised. In this paper we study the relationship between the \textit{local geometry of the learned manifold} and downstream generation. Based on the theory of continuous piecewise-linear (CPWL) generators, we use three geometric descriptors - scaling (

2024-08-15

ArXiv (preprint)

Trust No Bot: Discovering Personal Disclosures in Human-LLM Conversations in the Wild

Niloofar Mireshghallah

Maria Antoniak

Yash More

Yejin Choi

Measuring personal disclosures made in human-chatbot interactions can provide a better understanding of users' AI literacy and facilitate pr… (see more)ivacy research for large language models (LLMs). We run an extensive, fine-grained analysis on the personal disclosures made by real users to commercial GPT models, investigating the leakage of personally identifiable and sensitive information. To understand the contexts in which users disclose to chatbots, we develop a taxonomy of tasks and sensitive topics, based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of naturally occurring conversations. We discuss these potential privacy harms and observe that: (1) personally identifiable information (PII) appears in unexpected contexts such as in translation or code editing (48% and 16% of the time, respectively) and (2) PII detection alone is insufficient to capture the sensitive topics that are common in human-chatbot interactions, such as detailed sexual preferences or specific drug use habits. We believe that these high disclosure rates are of significant importance for researchers and data curators, and we call for the design of appropriate nudging mechanisms to help users moderate their interactions.

2024-07-10

colmweb.org/COLM/2024/Conference (accepted)

openreview.net

Position: Cracking the Code of Cascading Disparity Towards Marginalized Communities

Mohammad Havaei

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

openreview.net

Towards More Realistic Extraction Attacks: An Adversarial Perspective

Yash More

Prakhar Ganesh

2024-07-02

ArXiv (preprint)

On The Local Geometry of Deep Generative Manifolds

Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun

Ibtihel Amara

Candice Schumann

Mohammad Havaei

In this paper, we study theoretically inspired local geometric descriptors of the data manifolds approximated by pre-trained generative mode… (see more)ls. The descriptors – local scaling (ψ), local rank (ν), and local complexity (δ) — characterize the uncertainty, dimensionality, and smoothness on the learned manifold, using only the network weights and architecture. We investigate and emphasize their critical role in understanding generative models. Our analysis reveals that the local geometry is intricately linked to the quality and diversity of generated outputs. Additionally, we see that the geometric properties are distinct for out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs as well as for prompts memorized by Stable Diffusion, showing the possible application of our proposed descriptors for downstream detection and assessment of pre-trained generative models.

2024-06-17

ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/GRaM (published)

openreview.net

Mitigating Disparate Impact of Differential Privacy in Federated Learning through Robust Clustering

Saber Malekmohammadi

Afaf Taïk

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning (ML) approach that keeps data localized and often incorporates Differential Priv… (see more)acy (DP) to enhance privacy guarantees. Similar to previous work on DP in ML, we observed that differentially private federated learning (DPFL) introduces performance disparities, particularly affecting minority groups. Recent work has attempted to address performance fairness in vanilla FL through clustering, but this method remains sensitive and prone to errors, which are further exacerbated by the DP noise in DPFL. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel clustered DPFL algorithm designed to effectively identify clients' clusters in highly heterogeneous settings while maintaining high accuracy with DP guarantees. To this end, we propose to cluster clients based on both their model updates and training loss values. Our proposed approach also addresses the server's uncertainties in clustering clients' model updates by employing larger batch sizes along with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to alleviate the impact of noise and potential clustering errors, especially in privacy-sensitive scenarios. We provide theoretical analysis of the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We also extensively evaluate our approach across diverse data distributions and privacy budgets and show its effectiveness in mitigating the disparate impact of DP in FL settings with a small computational cost.

2024-05-29

ArXiv (preprint)

The Cost of Arbitrariness for Individuals: Examining the Legal and Technical Challenges of Model Multiplicity

Prakhar Ganesh

Ihsan Ibrahim Daldaban

Ignacio Cofone

Model multiplicity, the phenomenon where multiple models achieve similar performance despite different underlying learned functions, introdu… (see more)ces arbitrariness in model selection. While this arbitrariness may seem inconsequential in expectation, its impact on individuals can be severe. This paper explores various individual concerns stemming from multiplicity, including the effects of arbitrariness beyond final predictions, disparate arbitrariness for individuals belonging to protected groups, and the challenges associated with the arbitrariness of a single algorithmic system creating a monopoly across various contexts. It provides both an empirical examination of these concerns and a comprehensive analysis from the legal standpoint, addressing how these issues are perceived in the anti-discrimination law in Canada. We conclude the discussion with technical challenges in the current landscape of model multiplicity to meet legal requirements and the legal gap between current law and the implications of arbitrariness in model selection, highlighting relevant future research directions for both disciplines.

2024-05-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Understanding Intrinsic Socioeconomic Biases in Large Language Models

Mina Arzaghi

Florian Carichon

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into critical decision-making processes, such as loan approvals and visa applicatio… (see more)ns, where inherent biases can lead to discriminatory outcomes. In this paper, we examine the nuanced relationship between demographic attributes and socioeconomic biases in LLMs, a crucial yet understudied area of fairness in LLMs. We introduce a novel dataset of one million English sentences to systematically quantify socioeconomic biases across various demographic groups. Our findings reveal pervasive socioeconomic biases in both established models such as GPT-2 and state-of-the-art models like Llama 2 and Falcon. We demonstrate that these biases are significantly amplified when considering intersectionality, with LLMs exhibiting a remarkable capacity to extract multiple demographic attributes from names and then correlate them with specific socioeconomic biases. This research highlights the urgent necessity for proactive and robust bias mitigation techniques to safeguard against discriminatory outcomes when deploying these powerful models in critical real-world applications.

2024-05-28

ArXiv (preprint)

Advancing Cultural Inclusivity: Optimizing Embedding Spaces for Balanced Music Recommendations

Armin Moradi

Nicola Neophytou

2024-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)

Fairness Incentives in Response to Unfair Dynamic Pricing

Jesse Thibodeau

Hadi Nekoei

Afaf Taïk

Janarthanan Rajendran

The use of dynamic pricing by profit-maximizing firms gives rise to demand fairness concerns, measured by discrepancies in consumer groups' … (see more)demand responses to a given pricing strategy. Notably, dynamic pricing may result in buyer distributions unreflective of those of the underlying population, which can be problematic in markets where fair representation is socially desirable. To address this, policy makers might leverage tools such as taxation and subsidy to adapt policy mechanisms dependent upon their social objective. In this paper, we explore the potential for AI methods to assist such intervention strategies. To this end, we design a basic simulated economy, wherein we introduce a dynamic social planner (SP) to generate corporate taxation schedules geared to incentivizing firms towards adopting fair pricing behaviours, and to use the collected tax budget to subsidize consumption among underrepresented groups. To cover a range of possible policy scenarios, we formulate our social planner's learning problem as a multi-armed bandit, a contextual bandit and finally as a full reinforcement learning (RL) problem, evaluating welfare outcomes from each case. To alleviate the difficulty in retaining meaningful tax rates that apply to less frequently occurring brackets, we introduce FairReplayBuffer, which ensures that our RL agent samples experiences uniformly across a discretized fairness space. We find that, upon deploying a learned tax and redistribution policy, social welfare improves on that of the fairness-agnostic baseline, and approaches that of the analytically optimal fairness-aware baseline for the multi-armed and contextual bandit settings, and surpassing it by 13.19% in the full RL setting.

2024-04-22

ArXiv (preprint)

Learning to Build Solutions in Stochastic Matching Problems Using Flows (Student Abstract)

William St-Arnaud

Margarida Carvalho

2024-03-24

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

Promoting Fair Vaccination Strategies through Influence Maximization: A Case Study on COVID-19 Spread

Nicola Neophytou

Afaf Taïk

The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic saw more severe outcomes for racial minority groups and economically-deprived communities. Such dispa… (see more)rities can be explained by several factors, including unequal access to healthcare, as well as the inability of low income groups to reduce their mobility due to work or social obligations. Moreover, senior citizens were found to be more susceptible to severe symptoms, largely due to age-related health reasons. Adapting vaccine distribution strategies to consider a range of demographics is therefore essential to address these disparities. In this study, we propose a novel approach that utilizes influence maximization (IM) on mobility networks to develop vaccination strategies which incorporate demographic fairness. By considering factors such as race, social status, age, and associated risk factors, we aim to optimize vaccine distribution to achieve various fairness definitions for one or more protected attributes at a time. Through extensive experiments conducted on Covid-19 spread in three major metropolitan areas across the United States, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in reducing disease transmission and promoting fairness in vaccination distribution.

2024-03-24

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)