Philipp Kellmeyer

Laura Londoño, Juana Valeria Hurtado, Nora Hertz et al.

Machine learning has significantly enhanced the abilities of robots, enabling them to perform a wide range of tasks in human environments and adapt to our uncertain real world. Recent works in various machine learning domains have highlighted the importance of accounting for fairness to ensure that these algorithms do not reproduce human biases and consequently lead to discriminatory outcomes. With robot learning systems increasingly performing more and more tasks in our everyday lives, it is crucial to understand the influence of such biases to prevent unintended behavior toward certain groups of people. In this work, we present the first survey on fairness in robot learning from an interdisciplinary perspective spanning technical, ethical, and legal challenges. We propose a taxonomy for sources of bias and the resulting types of discrimination due to them. Using examples from different robot learning domains, we examine scenarios of unfair outcomes and strategies to mitigate them. We present early advances in the field by covering different fairness definitions, ethical and legal considerations, and methods for fair robot learning. With this work, we aim to pave the road for groundbreaking developments in fair robot learning.

Nursultan Mamatov, Philipp Kellmeyer

Accurate early prediction of in-hospital mortality in intensive care units (ICUs) is essential for timely clinical intervention and efficient resource allocation. This study develops and evaluates machine learning models that integrate both structured clinical data and unstructured textual information, specifically discharge summaries and radiology reports, from the MIMIC-IV database. We used LASSO and XGBoost for feature selection, followed by a multivariate logistic regression trained on the top features identified by both models. Incorporating textual features using TF-IDF and BERT embeddings significantly improved predictive performance. The final logistic regression model, which combined structured and textual input, achieved an AUC of 0.918, compared to 0.753 when using structured data alone, a relative improvement 22%. The analysis of the decision curve demonstrated a superior standardized net benefit in a wide range of threshold probabilities (0.2-0.8), confirming the clinical utility of the model. These results underscore the added prognostic value of unstructured clinical notes and support their integration into interpretable feature-driven risk prediction models for ICU patients.