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We consider the problem of learning fair policies for multi-stage selection problems from observational data. This problem arises in several high-stakes domains such as company hiring, loan approval, or bail decisions where outcomes (e.g., career success, loan repayment, recidivism) are only observed for those selected. We propose a multi-stage framework that can be augmented with various fairness constraints, such as demographic parity or equal opportunity. This problem is a highly intractable infinite chance-constrained program involving the unknown joint distribution of covariates and outcomes.  Motivated by the potential impact of selection decisions on people’s lives and livelihoods, we propose to focus on interpretable linear selection rules. Leveraging tools from causal inference and sample average approximation, we obtain an asymptotically consistent solution to this selection problem by solving a mixed binary conic optimization problem, which can be solved using standard off-the-shelf solvers. We conduct extensive computational experiments on a variety of datasets adapted from the UCI repository on which we show that our proposed approaches can achieve an 11.6% improvement in precision and a 38% reduction in the measure of unfairness compared to the existing selection policy.

AAAI 2024

Learning Fair Policies for Multi-Stage Selection Problems from Observational Data | VIDEO

observational data

mixed discrete/continuous optimization

bias and fairness

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

There has been significant progress in improving the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs) through enhancements in graph data, model architecture design, and training strategies. For fairness in graphs, recent studies achieve fair representations and predictions through either graph data pre-processing (e.g., node feature masking, and topology rewiring) or fair training strategies (e.g., regularization, adversarial debiasing, and fair contrastive learning). How to achieve fairness in graphs from the model architecture perspective is less explored. More importantly, GNNs exhibit worse fairness performance compared to multilayer perception since their model architecture (i.e., neighbor aggregation) amplifies biases. To this end, we aim to achieve fairness via a new GNN architecture. We propose \textsf{F}air \textsf{M}essage \textsf{P}assing (FMP) designed within a unified optimization framework for GNNs. Notably, FMP \textit{explicitly} renders sensitive attribute usage in \textit{forward propagation} for node classification task using cross-entropy loss without data pre-processing. In FMP, the aggregation is first adopted to utilize neighbors' information and then the bias mitigation step explicitly pushes demographic group node presentation centers together.
In this way, FMP scheme can aggregate useful information from neighbors and mitigate bias to achieve better fairness and prediction tradeoff performance. 
Experiments on node classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed FMP outperforms several baselines in terms of fairness and accuracy on three real-world datasets. The code is available in {\url{https://github.com/zhimengj0326/FMP}}.

Chasing Fairness in Graphs: A GNN Architecture Perspective

Deep neural networks are characterized by multiple symmetrical, equi-loss solutions that are redundant. Thus, the order of neurons in a layer and feature maps can be given arbitrary permutations, without affecting (or minimally affecting) their output. If we shuffle these neurons, or if we apply to them some perturbations (like fine-tuning) can we put them back in the original order i.e. re-synchronize? Is there a possible corruption threat? Answering these questions is important for applications like neural network white-box watermarking for ownership tracking and integrity verification.
We advance a method to re-synchronize the order of permuted neurons. Our method is also effective if neurons are further altered by parameter pruning, quantization, and fine-tuning, showing robustness to integrity attacks. Additionally, we provide theoretical and practical evidence for the usual means to corrupt the integrity of the model, resulting in a solution to counter it. We test our approach on popular computer vision datasets and models, and we illustrate the threat and our countermeasure on a popular white-box watermarking method.

Find the Lady: Permutation and Re-synchronization of Deep Neural Networks

Deep Evidential Regression (DER) places a prior on the original Gaussian likelihood function and treats learning as an evidence acquisition process to quantify uncertainty by inferring the parameters of the prior. For the validity of the evidence theory, DER requires specialized activation functions to ensure that the prior parameters remain non-negative. However, such constraints can lead to evidence contraction, causing sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we analyse DER theoretically, revealing the intrinsic limitations that lead to sub-optimal performance: the non-negativity constraints on the Normal Inverse-Gamma (NIG) prior parameter lead to the evidence contraction under the specialised activation function, which hampers the optimisation of DER performance. Based on this foundation, we then design a Non-saturating Uncertainty Regularization term, which effectively ensures that the accuracy is further optimised in the right direction, mitigating the above issue. Experiments on the real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach enhances the performance of DER while maximising the ability to preserve uncertainty quantification.

The Evidence Contraction Issue in Deep Evidential Regression: Discussion and Solution

Tree ensembles are one of the most widely used model classes. 
However, these models are susceptible to adversarial examples, which are slightly perturbed examples that elicit a misprediction.
There has been significant research on designing approaches to verify the robustness of tree ensembles to such attacks. However, existing verification algorithms for tree ensembles are only able to analyze binary classifiers and hence address multiclass problems by reducing them to binary ones using a one-versus-other strategy. In this paper, we show that naively applying this strategy can yield incorrect results in certain situations. We address this shortcoming by proposing a novel approximate heuristic approach to verification for multiclass tree ensembles. Our approach is based on a novel generalization of the verification task, which we show emits other relevant verification queries.

Robustness Verification of Multi-Class Tree Ensembles

Backdoors on federated learning will be diluted by subsequent benign updates. This is reflected in the significant reduction of attack success rate as iterations increase, ultimately failing. We use a new metric to quantify the degree of this weakened backdoor effect, called attack persistence. Given that research to improve this performance has not been widely noted, we propose a Full Combination Backdoor Attack (FCBA) method. It aggregates more combined trigger information for a more complete backdoor pattern in the global model. Trained backdoored global model is more resilient to benign updates, leading to a higher attack success rate on the test set. We test on three datasets and evaluate with two models across various settings. FCBA's persistence outperforms SOTA federated learning backdoor attacks. On GTSRB, post-attack 120 rounds, our attack success rate rose over 50% from baseline. The core code of our method is available at https://github.com/PhD-TaoLiu/FCBA.

Beyond Traditional Threats: A Persistent Backdoor Attack on Federated Learning

Partial observability and uncertainty are common problems in sequential decision-making that particularly impede the use of formal models such as Markov decision processes (MDPs). However, in practice, agents may be able to employ costly sensors to measure their environment and resolve partial observability by gathering information. Moreover, imprecise transition functions can capture model uncertainty. We combine these concepts and extend MDPs to robust active-measuring MDPs (RAM-MDPs). We present an active-measure heuristic to solve RAM-MDPs efficiently and show that model uncertainty can, counterintuitively, let agents take fewer measurements. We propose a method to counteract this behavior while only incurring a bounded additional cost. We empirically compare our methods to several baselines and show their superior scalability and performance.

Robust Active Measuring under Model Uncertainty

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved human-level fluency in text generation, making it difficult to distinguish between human-written and LLM-generated texts. This poses a growing risk of misuse of LLMs and demands the development of detectors to identify LLM-generated texts. However, existing detectors lack robustness against attacks: they degrade detection accuracy by simply paraphrasing LLM-generated texts. Furthermore, a malicious user might attempt to deliberately evade the detectors based on detection results, but this has not been assumed in previous studies. In this paper, we propose OUTFOX, a framework that improves the robustness of LLM-generated-text detectors by allowing both the detector and the attacker to consider each other's output. In this framework, the attacker uses the detector's prediction labels as examples for in-context learning and adversarially generates essays that are harder to detect, while the detector uses the adversarially generated essays as examples for in-context learning to learn to detect essays from a strong attacker. Experiments in the domain of student essays show that the proposed detector improves the detection performance on the attacker-generated texts by up to +41.3 points F1-score. Furthermore, the proposed detector shows a state-of-the-art detection performance: up to 96.9 points F1-score, beating existing detectors on non-attacked texts. Finally, the proposed attacker drastically degrades the performance of detectors by up to -57.0 points F1-score, massively outperforming the baseline paraphrasing method for evading detection. We release our code and dataset.

OUTFOX: LLM-Generated Essay Detection Through In-Context Learning with Adversarially Generated Examples | VIDEO

Text-to-Image models such as Stable Diffusion have shown impressive image generation synthesis, thanks to the utilization of large-scale datasets. However, these datasets may contain sexually explicit, copyrighted, or undesirable content, which allows the model to directly generate them. Given that retraining these large models on individual concept deletion requests is infeasible, fine-tuning algorithms have been developed to tackle concept erasing in diffusion models. While these algorithms yield good concept erasure, they all present one of the following issues: 1) the corrupted feature space yields synthesis of disintegrated objects, 2) the initially synthesized content undergoes a divergence in both spatial structure and semantics in the generated images, and 3) sub-optimal training updates heighten the model's susceptibility to utility harm. These issues severely degrade the original utility of generative models. In this work, we present a new approach that solves all of these challenges. We take inspiration from the concept of classifier guidance and propose a surgical update on the classifier guidance term while constraining the drift of the unconditional score term. Furthermore, our algorithm empowers the user to select an alternative to the erasing concept, allowing for more controllability. Our experimental results show that our algorithm not only erases the target concept effectively but also preserves the model’s generation capability.

All but One: Surgical Erasing with Model Preservation in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Training reinforcement learning (RL) agents to achieve desired goals while also acting morally is a challenging problem. Transformer-based language models (LMs) have shown some promise in moral awareness, but their use in different contexts is problematic because of the complexity and implicitness of human morality. In this paper, we build on text-based games, which are challenging environments for current RL agents, and propose the HuMAL (Human-guided Morality Awareness Learning) algorithm, which adaptively learns personal values through human-agent collaboration with minimal manual feedback. We evaluate HuMAL on the Jiminy Cricket benchmark, a set of text-based games with various scenes and dense morality annotations, using both simulated and actual human feedback. The experimental results demonstrate that with a small amount of human feedback, HuMAL can improve task performance and reduce immoral behavior in a variety of games and is adaptable to different personal values.

Human-Guided Moral Decision Making in Text-Based Games

Dataset sanitization is a widely adopted proactive defense against poisoning-based backdoor attacks, aimed at filtering out and removing poisoned samples from training datasets. However, existing methods have shown limited efficacy in countering the ever-evolving trigger functions, and often leading to considerable degradation of benign accuracy. In this paper, we propose DataElixir, a novel sanitization approach tailored to purify poisoned datasets. We leverage diffusion models to eliminate trigger features and restore benign features, thereby turning the poisoned samples into benign ones. Specifically, with multiple iterations of the forward and reverse process, we extract intermediary images and their predicted labels for each sample in the original dataset. Then, we identify anomalous samples in terms of the presence of label transition of the intermediary images, detect the target label by quantifying distribution discrepancy, select their purified images considering pixel and feature distance, and determine their ground-truth labels by training a benign model. Experiments conducted on 9 popular attacks demonstrates that DataElixir effectively mitigates various complex attacks while exerting minimal impact on benign accuracy, surpassing the performance of baseline defense methods.

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