Golnoosh Farnadi

Deepak Ramachandran

Negar Rostamzadeh

Junfeng He

Mohammad Havaei

Katherine Heller

2025-01-22

ICLR.cc/2025/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

Embedding Cultural Diversity in Prototype-based Recommender Systems

Armin Moradi

Nicola Neophytou

Florian Carichon

Popularity bias in recommender systems can increase cultural overrepresentation by favoring norms from dominant cultures and marginalizing u… (see more)nderrepresented groups. This issue is critical for platforms offering cultural products, as they influence consumption patterns and human perceptions. In this work, we address popularity bias by identifying demographic biases within prototype-based matrix factorization methods. Using the country of origin as a proxy for cultural identity, we link this demographic attribute to popularity bias by refining the embedding space learning process. First, we propose filtering out irrelevant prototypes to improve representativity. Second, we introduce a regularization technique to enforce a uniform distribution of prototypes within the embedding space. Across four datasets, our results demonstrate a 27\% reduction in the average rank of long-tail items and a 2\% reduction in the average rank of items from underrepresented countries. Additionally, our model achieves a 2\% improvement in HitRatio@10 compared to the state-of-the-art, highlighting that fairness is enhanced without compromising recommendation quality. Moreover, the distribution of prototypes leads to more inclusive explanations by better aligning items with diverse prototypes.

2025-01-01

European Conference on Information Retrieval (published)

Hallucination Detox: Sensitivity Dropout (SenD) for Large Language Model Training

Shahrad Mohammadzadeh

Juan David Guerra

Marco Bonizzato

Reihaneh Rabbany

2025-01-01

ACL (1) (published)

A Learning-Based Framework for Fair and Scalable Solution Generation in Kidney Exchange Problems

William St-Arnaud

Margarida Carvalho

2025-01-01

Trans. Mach. Learn. Res. (published)

openreview.net

Embedding Cultural Diversity in Prototype-based Recommender Systems

Armin Moradi

Nicola Neophytou

Florian Carichon

Popularity bias in recommender systems can increase cultural overrepresentation by favoring norms from dominant cultures and marginalizing u… (see more)nderrepresented groups. This issue is critical for platforms offering cultural products, as they influence consumption patterns and human perceptions. In this work, we address popularity bias by identifying demographic biases within prototype-based matrix factorization methods. Using the country of origin as a proxy for cultural identity, we link this demographic attribute to popularity bias by refining the embedding space learning process. First, we propose filtering out irrelevant prototypes to improve representativity. Second, we introduce a regularization technique to enforce a uniform distribution of prototypes within the embedding space. Across four datasets, our results demonstrate a 27\% reduction in the average rank of long-tail items and a 2\% reduction in the average rank of items from underrepresented countries. Additionally, our model achieves a 2\% improvement in HitRatio@10 compared to the state-of-the-art, highlighting that fairness is enhanced without compromising recommendation quality. Moreover, the distribution of prototypes leads to more inclusive explanations by better aligning items with diverse prototypes.

2024-12-18

ArXiv (preprint)

Embedding Cultural Diversity in Prototype-based Recommender Systems

Armin Moradi

Nicola Neophytou

Florian Carichon

Popularity bias in recommender systems can increase cultural overrepresentation by favoring norms from dominant cultures and marginalizing u… (see more)nderrepresented groups. This issue is critical for platforms offering cultural products, as they influence consumption patterns and human perceptions. In this work, we address popularity bias by identifying demographic biases within prototype-based matrix factorization methods. Using the country of origin as a proxy for cultural identity, we link this demographic attribute to popularity bias by refining the embedding space learning process. First, we propose filtering out irrelevant prototypes to improve representativity. Second, we introduce a regularization technique to enforce a uniform distribution of prototypes within the embedding space. Across four datasets, our results demonstrate a 27\% reduction in the average rank of long-tail items and a 2\% reduction in the average rank of items from underrepresented countries. Additionally, our model achieves a 2\% improvement in HitRatio@10 compared to the state-of-the-art, highlighting that fairness is enhanced without compromising recommendation quality. Moreover, the distribution of prototypes leads to more inclusive explanations by better aligning items with diverse prototypes.

2024-12-18

ArXiv (preprint)

Different Horses for Different Courses: Comparing Bias Mitigation Algorithms in ML

Prakhar Ganeesh

Usman Gohar

Lu Cheng

With fairness concerns gaining significant attention in Machine Learning (ML), several bias mitigation techniques have been proposed, often … (see more)compared against each other to find the best method. These benchmarking efforts tend to use a common setup for evaluation under the assumption that providing a uniform environment ensures a fair comparison. However, bias mitigation techniques are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, random seeds, feature selection, etc., meaning that comparison on just one setting can unfairly favour certain algorithms. In this work, we show significant variance in fairness achieved by several algorithms and the influence of the learning pipeline on fairness scores. We highlight that most bias mitigation techniques can achieve comparable performance, given the freedom to perform hyperparameter optimization, suggesting that the choice of the evaluation parameters-rather than the mitigation technique itself-can sometimes create the perceived superiority of one method over another. We hope our work encourages future research on how various choices in the lifecycle of developing an algorithm impact fairness, and trends that guide the selection of appropriate algorithms.

2024-11-17

ArXiv (preprint)

Different Horses for Different Courses: Comparing Bias Mitigation Algorithms in ML

Prakhar Ganeesh

Usman Gohar

Lu Cheng

With fairness concerns gaining significant attention in Machine Learning (ML), several bias mitigation techniques have been proposed, often … (see more)compared against each other to find the best method. These benchmarking efforts tend to use a common setup for evaluation under the assumption that providing a uniform environment ensures a fair comparison. However, bias mitigation techniques are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, random seeds, feature selection, etc., meaning that comparison on just one setting can unfairly favour certain algorithms. In this work, we show significant variance in fairness achieved by several algorithms and the influence of the learning pipeline on fairness scores. We highlight that most bias mitigation techniques can achieve comparable performance, given the freedom to perform hyperparameter optimization, suggesting that the choice of the evaluation parameters-rather than the mitigation technique itself-can sometimes create the perceived superiority of one method over another. We hope our work encourages future research on how various choices in the lifecycle of developing an algorithm impact fairness, and trends that guide the selection of appropriate algorithms.

2024-11-17

ArXiv (preprint)

Beyond the Safety Bundle: Auditing the Helpful and Harmless Dataset

Khaoula Chehbouni

Jonathan Colacco-Carr

Yash More

Jackie Ck Cheung

In an effort to mitigate the harms of large language models (LLMs), learning from human feedback (LHF) has been used to steer LLMs towards o… (see more)utputs that are intended to be both less harmful and more helpful. Despite the widespread adoption of LHF in practice, the quality of this feedback and its effectiveness as a safety mitigation technique remain unclear. This study addresses these issues by auditing the widely-used Helpful and Harmless (HH) dataset by Anthropic. Our work includes: (1) a thorough investigation of the dataset's content through both manual and automated evaluation; (2) experiments demonstrating the dataset's impact on models' safety; and (3) an analysis of the 100 most influential papers citing this dataset. Through our audit, we showcase how conceptualization failures and quality issues identified in the HH dataset can create additional harms by leading to disparate safety behaviors across demographic groups. Our findings highlight the need for more nuanced, context-sensitive approaches to safety mitigation in LLMs.

2024-11-12

ArXiv (preprint)

Beyond the Safety Bundle: Auditing the Helpful and Harmless Dataset

Yash More

In an effort to mitigate the harms of large language models (LLMs), learning from human feedback (LHF) has been used to steer LLMs towards o… (see more)utputs that are intended to be both less harmful and more helpful. Despite the widespread adoption of LHF in practice, the quality of this feedback and its effectiveness as a safety mitigation technique remain unclear. This study addresses these issues by auditing the widely-used Helpful and Harmless (HH) dataset by Anthropic. Our work includes: (1) a thorough investigation of the dataset's content through both manual and automated evaluation; (2) experiments demonstrating the dataset's impact on models' safety; and (3) an analysis of the 100 most influential papers citing this dataset. Through our audit, we showcase how conceptualization failures and quality issues identified in the HH dataset can create additional harms by leading to disparate safety behaviors across demographic groups. Our findings highlight the need for more nuanced, context-sensitive approaches to safety mitigation in LLMs.

2024-11-12

ArXiv (preprint)

Multilingual Hallucination Gaps in Large Language Models

Cl'ea Chataigner

Afaf Taïk

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as alternatives to traditional search engines given their capacity to generate text that … (see more)resembles human language. However, this shift is concerning, as LLMs often generate hallucinations, misleading or false information that appears highly credible. In this study, we explore the phenomenon of hallucinations across multiple languages in freeform text generation, focusing on what we call multilingual hallucination gaps. These gaps reflect differences in the frequency of hallucinated answers depending on the prompt and language used. To quantify such hallucinations, we used the FactScore metric and extended its framework to a multilingual setting. We conducted experiments using LLMs from the LLaMA, Qwen, and Aya families, generating biographies in 19 languages and comparing the results to Wikipedia pages. Our results reveal variations in hallucination rates, especially between high and low resource languages, raising important questions about LLM multilingual performance and the challenges in evaluating hallucinations in multilingual freeform text generation.

2024-10-23

ArXiv (preprint)

Multilingual Hallucination Gaps in Large Language Models

Cl'ea Chataigner

Afaf Taïk

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as alternatives to traditional search engines given their capacity to generate text that … (see more)resembles human language. However, this shift is concerning, as LLMs often generate hallucinations, misleading or false information that appears highly credible. In this study, we explore the phenomenon of hallucinations across multiple languages in freeform text generation, focusing on what we call multilingual hallucination gaps. These gaps reflect differences in the frequency of hallucinated answers depending on the prompt and language used. To quantify such hallucinations, we used the FactScore metric and extended its framework to a multilingual setting. We conducted experiments using LLMs from the LLaMA, Qwen, and Aya families, generating biographies in 19 languages and comparing the results to Wikipedia pages. Our results reveal variations in hallucination rates, especially between high and low resource languages, raising important questions about LLM multilingual performance and the challenges in evaluating hallucinations in multilingual freeform text generation.

2024-10-23

ArXiv (preprint)