Abigail Z. Jacobs

Joshua A. Kroll, Andrew Smart, R. Stuart Geiger et al.

As automated decision-making and data-driven technologies pervade society and are used to manage consequential outcomes, understanding the technology's capabilities, limitations, and attendant risks in context requires analysis of full sociotechnical systems. Sociotechnical analysis of risks in highly complex systems provides clear lessons for the design and evaluation of AI systems, transcending a technical focus on reliable or "responsibly designed" components to understand risks at a systems level. Human-made catastrophes have been studied for decades because of the severity of these events: consider Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima-Daiichi, Bhopal, the Challenger disaster. A common misconception is that these kinds of events are freak accidents, resulting from the inherently unforeseeable interactions in complex systems. Closer examination reveals that the risks and hazards were well-known beforehand but not acted upon due to social structural, political and economic factors. We outline several areas where the development and use of AI can benefit from learning these unlearned lessons: improved risk perception, communication, and analysis at the organizational level; traceability of requirements and responsibilities; and holistic approaches to responsibility and safety that include social and organizational dynamics as first-order engineering concerns. For each area, we offer concrete unlearned lessons and exemplify how they led to failure in prior accidents as well as examples of how these lessons remain unlearned for modern computing systems, particularly AI.

Meera Desai, Dallas Card, Abigail Z. Jacobs

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping social science methodology. Researchers increasingly prompt language models to generate quantitative measurements of social concepts, for example labeling data or simulating survey responses. Yet LLMs pose methodological challenges including bias, hallucination, and brittleness across contexts, with unclear threats to validity. Standard practices and norms for addressing these challenges are still emerging. We collect and systematically analyze validation practices in a comprehensive corpus of papers from eight flagship social science journals that use LLMs as measurement instruments. We find that LLM-generated measurements frequently play a central role in empirical analyses, yet validation practices are inconsistent and limited. We outline complementary strategies for more robust validation, pointing toward better norms and standards around the use of LLMs in social science.

A. Feder Cooper, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Miranda Bogen et al. · deepmind

"Machine unlearning" is a popular proposed solution for mitigating the existence of content in an AI model that is problematic for legal or moral reasons, including privacy, copyright, safety, and more. For example, unlearning is often invoked as a solution for removing the effects of specific information from a generative-AI model's parameters, e.g., a particular individual's personal data or the inclusion of copyrighted content in the model's training data. Unlearning is also proposed as a way to prevent a model from generating targeted types of information in its outputs, e.g., generations that closely resemble a particular individual's data or reflect the concept of "Spiderman." Both of these goals--the targeted removal of information from a model and the targeted suppression of information from a model's outputs--present various technical and substantive challenges. We provide a framework for ML researchers and policymakers to think rigorously about these challenges, identifying several mismatches between the goals of unlearning and feasible implementations. These mismatches explain why unlearning is not a general-purpose solution for circumscribing generative-AI model behavior in service of broader positive impact.

Emma Harvey, Hauke Sandhaus, Abigail Z. Jacobs et al.

Motion capture systems, used across various domains, make body representations concrete through technical processes. We argue that the measurement of bodies and the validation of measurements for motion capture systems can be understood as social practices. By analyzing the findings of a systematic literature review (N=278) through the lens of social practice theory, we show how these practices, and their varying attention to errors, become ingrained in motion capture design and innovation over time. Moreover, we show how contemporary motion capture systems perpetuate assumptions about human bodies and their movements. We suggest that social practices of measurement and validation are ubiquitous in the development of data- and sensor-driven systems more broadly, and provide this work as a basis for investigating hidden design assumptions and their potential negative consequences in human-computer interaction.

Aparna Balagopalan, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Asia Biega

Online platforms mediate access to opportunity: relevance-based rankings create and constrain options by allocating exposure to job openings and job candidates in hiring platforms, or sellers in a marketplace. In order to do so responsibly, these socially consequential systems employ various fairness measures and interventions, many of which seek to allocate exposure based on worthiness. Because these constructs are typically not directly observable, platforms must instead resort to using proxy scores such as relevance and infer them from behavioral signals such as searcher clicks. Yet, it remains an open question whether relevance fulfills its role as such a worthiness score in high-stakes fair rankings. In this paper, we combine perspectives and tools from the social sciences, information retrieval, and fairness in machine learning to derive a set of desired criteria that relevance scores should satisfy in order to meaningfully guide fairness interventions. We then empirically show that not all of these criteria are met in a case study of relevance inferred from biased user click data. We assess the impact of these violations on the estimated system fairness and analyze whether existing fairness interventions may mitigate the identified issues. Our analyses and results surface the pressing need for new approaches to relevance collection and generation that are suitable for use in fair ranking.

Jen J. Gong, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Toby E. Stuart et al.

The opioid epidemic in the United States claims over 40,000 lives per year, and it is estimated that well over two million Americans have an opioid use disorder. Over-prescription and misuse of prescription opioids play an important role in the epidemic. Individuals who are prescribed opioids, and who are diagnosed with opioid use disorder, have diverse underlying health states. Policy interventions targeting prescription opioid use, opioid use disorder, and overdose often fail to account for this variation. To identify latent health states, or phenotypes, pertinent to opioid use and opioid use disorders, we use probabilistic topic modeling with medical diagnosis histories from a statewide population of individuals who were prescribed opioids. We demonstrate that our learned phenotypes are predictive of future opioid use-related outcomes. In addition, we show how the learned phenotypes can provide important context for variability in opioid prescriptions. Understanding the heterogeneity in individual health states and in prescription opioid use can help identify policy interventions to address this public health crisis.

Abigail Z. Jacobs, Aaron Clauset

Research on probabilistic models of networks now spans a wide variety of fields, including physics, sociology, biology, statistics, and machine learning. These efforts have produced a diverse ecology of models and methods. Despite this diversity, many of these models share a common underlying structure: pairwise interactions (edges) are generated with probability conditional on latent vertex attributes. Differences between models generally stem from different philosophical choices about how to learn from data or different empirically-motivated goals. The highly interdisciplinary nature of work on these generative models, however, has inhibited the development of a unified view of their similarities and differences. For instance, novel theoretical models and optimization techniques developed in machine learning are largely unknown within the social and biological sciences, which have instead emphasized model interpretability. Here, we describe a unified view of generative models for networks that draws together many of these disparate threads and highlights the fundamental similarities and differences that span these fields. We then describe a number of opportunities and challenges for future work that are revealed by this view.

Daniel B. Larremore, Aaron Clauset, Abigail Z. Jacobs

Bipartite networks are a common type of network data in which there are two types of vertices, and only vertices of different types can be connected. While bipartite networks exhibit community structure like their unipartite counterparts, existing approaches to bipartite community detection have drawbacks, including implicit parameter choices, loss of information through one-mode projections, and lack of interpretability. Here we solve the community detection problem for bipartite networks by formulating a bipartite stochastic block model, which explicitly includes vertex type information and may be trivially extended to $k$-partite networks. This bipartite stochastic block model yields a projection-free and statistically principled method for community detection that makes clear assumptions and parameter choices and yields interpretable results. We demonstrate this model's ability to efficiently and accurately find community structure in synthetic bipartite networks with known structure and in real-world bipartite networks with unknown structure, and we characterize its performance in practical contexts.

Christopher Aicher, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Aaron Clauset

We generalize the stochastic block model to the important case in which edges are annotated with weights drawn from an exponential family distribution. This generalization introduces several technical difficulties for model estimation, which we solve using a Bayesian approach. We introduce a variational algorithm that efficiently approximates the model's posterior distribution for dense graphs. In specific numerical experiments on edge-weighted networks, this weighted stochastic block model outperforms the common approach of first applying a single threshold to all weights and then applying the classic stochastic block model, which can obscure latent block structure in networks. This model will enable the recovery of latent structure in a broader range of network data than was previously possible.

Sears Merritt, Abigail Z. Jacobs, Winter Mason et al.

In many complex social systems, the timing and frequency of interactions between individuals are observable but friendship ties are hidden. Recovering these hidden ties, particularly for casual users who are relatively less active, would enable a wide variety of friendship-aware applications in domains where labeled data are often unavailable, including online advertising and national security. Here, we investigate the accuracy of multiple statistical features, based either purely on temporal interaction patterns or on the cooperative nature of the interactions, for automatically extracting latent social ties. Using self-reported friendship and non-friendship labels derived from an anonymous online survey, we learn highly accurate predictors for recovering hidden friendships within a massive online data set encompassing 18 billion interactions among 17 million individuals of the popular online game Halo: Reach. We find that the accuracy of many features improves as more data accumulates, and cooperative features are generally reliable. However, periodicities in interaction time series are sufficient to correctly classify 95% of ties, even for casual users. These results clarify the nature of friendship in online social environments and suggest new opportunities and new privacy concerns for friendship-aware applications that do not require the disclosure of private friendship information.