Anneke Wernerfelt

Seung Hyun Cheon, Anneke Wernerfelt, Sorelle A. Friedler et al.

Machine learning models routinely automate decisions in applications like lending and hiring. In such settings, consumer protection rules require companies that deploy models to explain predictions to decision subjects. These rules are motivated, in part, by the belief that explanations can promote recourse by revealing information that individuals can use to contest or improve their outcomes. In practice, many companies comply with these rules by providing individuals with a list of the most important features for their prediction, which they identify based on feature importance scores from feature attribution methods such as SHAP or LIME. In this work, we show how these practices can undermine consumers by highlighting features that would not lead to an improved outcome and by explaining predictions that cannot be changed. We propose to address these issues by highlighting features based on their responsiveness score -- i.e., the probability that an individual can attain a target prediction by changing a specific feature. We develop efficient methods to compute responsiveness scores for any model and any dataset. We conduct an extensive empirical study on the responsiveness of explanations in lending. Our results show that standard practices in consumer finance can backfire by presenting consumers with reasons without recourse, and demonstrate how our approach improves consumer protection by highlighting responsive features and identifying fixed predictions.

Ahmed Jaafar, Shreyas Sundara Raman, Sudarshan Harithas et al.

Learning to execute long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks is crucial for advancing robotics in household and workplace settings. However, current approaches are typically data-inefficient, underscoring the need for improved models that require realistically sized benchmarks to evaluate their efficiency. To address this, we introduce the LAMBDA (λ) benchmark-Long-horizon Actions for Mobile-manipulation Benchmarking of Directed Activities-which evaluates the data efficiency of models on language-conditioned, long-horizon, multi-room, multi-floor, pick-and-place tasks using a dataset of manageable size, more feasible for collection. Our benchmark includes 571 human-collected demonstrations that provide realism and diversity in simulated and real-world settings. Unlike planner-generated data, these trajectories offer natural variability and replay-verifiability, ensuring robust learning and evaluation. We leverage λ to benchmark current end-to-end learning methods and a modular neuro-symbolic approach that combines foundation models with task and motion planning. We find that learning methods, even when pretrained, yield lower success rates, while a neuro-symbolic method performs significantly better and requires less data.