Impact of Data Distribution on Fairness Guarantees in Equitable Deep LearningYan Luo, Congcong Wen, Min Shi et al.
We present a comprehensive theoretical framework analyzing the relationship between data distributions and fairness guarantees in equitable deep learning. Our work establishes novel theoretical bounds that explicitly account for data distribution heterogeneity across demographic groups, while introducing a formal analysis framework that minimizes expected loss differences across these groups. We derive comprehensive theoretical bounds for fairness errors and convergence rates, and characterize how distributional differences between groups affect the fundamental trade-off between fairness and accuracy. Through extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including FairVision (ophthalmology), CheXpert (chest X-rays), HAM10000 (dermatology), and FairFace (facial recognition), we validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that differences in feature distributions across demographic groups significantly impact model fairness, with performance disparities particularly pronounced in racial categories. The theoretical bounds we derive crroborate these empirical observations, providing insights into the fundamental limits of achieving fairness in deep learning models when faced with heterogeneous data distributions. This work advances our understanding of fairness in AI-based diagnosis systems and provides a theoretical foundation for developing more equitable algorithms. The code for analysis is publicly available via \url{https://github.com/Harvard-Ophthalmology-AI-Lab/fairness_guarantees}.
16.7CEOct 14, 2024
Modeling News Interactions and Influence for Financial Market PredictionMengyu Wang, Shay B. Cohen, Tiejun Ma
The diffusion of financial news into market prices is a complex process, making it challenging to evaluate the connections between news events and market movements. This paper introduces FININ (Financial Interconnected News Influence Network), a novel market prediction model that captures not only the links between news and prices but also the interactions among news items themselves. FININ effectively integrates multi-modal information from both market data and news articles. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets, encompassing the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 indices over a 15-year period and over 2.7 million news articles. The results demonstrate FININ's effectiveness, outperforming advanced market prediction models with an improvement of 0.429 and 0.341 in the daily Sharpe ratio for the two markets respectively. Moreover, our results reveal insights into the financial news, including the delayed market pricing of news, the long memory effect of news, and the limitations of financial sentiment analysis in fully extracting predictive power from news data.
FairDiffusion: Enhancing Equity in Latent Diffusion Models via Fair Bayesian PerturbationYan Luo, Muhammad Osama Khan, Congcong Wen et al.
Recent progress in generative AI, especially diffusion models, has demonstrated significant utility in text-to-image synthesis. Particularly in healthcare, these models offer immense potential in generating synthetic datasets and training medical students. However, despite these strong performances, it remains uncertain if the image generation quality is consistent across different demographic subgroups. To address this critical concern, we present the first comprehensive study on the fairness of medical text-to-image diffusion models. Our extensive evaluations of the popular Stable Diffusion model reveal significant disparities across gender, race, and ethnicity. To mitigate these biases, we introduce FairDiffusion, an equity-aware latent diffusion model that enhances fairness in both image generation quality as well as the semantic correlation of clinical features. In addition, we also design and curate FairGenMed, the first dataset for studying the fairness of medical generative models. Complementing this effort, we further evaluate FairDiffusion on two widely-used external medical datasets: HAM10000 (dermatoscopic images) and CheXpert (chest X-rays) to demonstrate FairDiffusion's effectiveness in addressing fairness concerns across diverse medical imaging modalities. Together, FairDiffusion and FairGenMed significantly advance research in fair generative learning, promoting equitable benefits of generative AI in healthcare.
5.9CESep 15, 2025
FinGEAR: Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer RetrievalYing Li, Mengyu Wang, Miguel de Carvalho et al.
Financial disclosures such as 10-K filings present challenging retrieval problems due to their length, regulatory section hierarchy, and domain-specific language, which standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models underuse. We introduce FinGEAR (Financial Mapping-Guided Enhanced Answer Retrieval), a retrieval framework tailored to financial documents. FinGEAR combines a finance lexicon for Item-level guidance (FLAM), dual hierarchical indices for within-Item search (Summary Tree and Question Tree), and a two-stage cross-encoder reranker. This design aligns retrieval with disclosure structure and terminology, enabling fine-grained, query-aware context selection. Evaluated on full 10-Ks with queries aligned to the FinQA dataset, FinGEAR delivers consistent gains in precision, recall, F1, and relevancy, improving F1 by up to 56.7% over flat RAG, 12.5% over graph-based RAGs, and 217.6% over prior tree-based systems, while also increasing downstream answer accuracy with a fixed reader. By jointly modeling section hierarchy and domain lexicon signals, FinGEAR improves retrieval fidelity and provides a practical foundation for high-stakes financial analysis.