Canada

Street-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats&#39; behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that  caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness.

AAAI 2024

Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning

peai: applications

hai: learning human values and preferences

peai: societal impact of ai

fairness & equity

peai: bias

Street-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats' behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that  caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness.

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.<br><br><br><br>

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. 

Public libraries are an essential social resource. We ask: are urban library systems providing equitable service to all residents, in terms of the books they have access to and check out? If not, what causes disparities: heterogeneous book collections, resident behavior and access, and/or operational policies? Existing methods leverage only system-level outcome data (such as overall checkouts per branch), and so cannot distinguish between these factors. As a result, it is difficult to use their results to guide interventions to increase equitable access. We propose a Bayesian framework to characterize book checkout behavior across multiple branches of a library system, learning heterogeneous book popularity, overall branch demand, and usage of the online hold system, while controlling for book availability. In collaboration with the New York Public Library, we apply our framework to granular data consisting of over 400,000 checkouts during 2022, and find substantial spatial and socio-economic disparities. We show that these disparities are largely driven by disparate use of the online holds system, which allows library patrons to receive books from any other branch. This system thus leads to a large outflow of popular books from branches in lower income neighborhoods to those in high income ones. Finally, we illustrate the use of our model and insights to quantify the impact of potential interventions, such as changing how books are internally routed between branches to fulfill hold requests.

Identifying and Addressing Disparities in Public Libraries with Bayesian Latent Variable Modeling

Decision-makers often observe the occurrence of events through a reporting process. City governments, for example, rely on resident reports to find and then resolve urban infrastructural problems such as fallen street trees, flooded basements, or rat infestations. Without additional assumptions, there is no way to distinguish events that occur but are not reported from events that truly did not occur--a fundamental problem in settings with positive-unlabeled data. Because disparities in reporting rates correlate with resident demographics, addressing incidents only on the basis of reports leads to systematic neglect in neighborhoods that are less likely to report events. We show how to overcome this challenge by leveraging the fact that events are spatially correlated. Our framework uses a Bayesian spatial latent variable model to infer event occurrence probabilities and applies it to storm-induced flooding reports in New York City, further pooling results across multiple storms. We show that a model accounting for under-reporting and spatial correlation predicts future reports more accurately than other models, and further induces a more equitable set of inspections: its allocations better reflect the population and provide equitable service to non-white, less traditionally educated, and lower-income residents. This finding reflects heterogeneous reporting behavior learned by the model: reporting rates are higher in Census tracts with higher populations, proportions of white residents, and proportions of owner-occupied households. Our work lays the groundwork for more equitable proactive government services, even with disparate reporting behavior.

A Bayesian Spatial Model to Correct Under-Reporting in Urban Crowdsourcing

Most countries provide veterans with various benefits to reward their sacrifice. Unfortunately, many veterans have failed to prove their status due to loss of military records. Thus, some governments allow the verification of those veterans through "buddy statements" obtained from the people who can vouch for the buddy's participation in the war. However, it is still challenging for veterans to find guarantors directly. With this background, we suggest to utilizing historical war records of combined operations to increase the pool of potential guarantors for the buddy statements. However, a combined operation network among troops can have missing edges and perturbations on attributes of the troop due to inaccurate information. In this study, we learn from some recorded interactions which might be incomplete and noisy, and predict missing linkages among the troops that might have interacted together in the war, by proposing Robust-SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction). It combines two Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures: robust Graph Convolutional Network which considers the uncertainty of node attributes with a probabilistic approach, and SEAL which improves the expressive power of the GNN with a labeling trick. Our proposed approach was applied to Korean War data with perturbations. For experimentations, we hid some actual interactions and found that Robust-SEAL restores missing interactions better than other GNN-based baselines.

Identifying Guarantors of War Veterans Using Robust-SEAL: A Case of the Korean War | VIDEO

Optimizing the configuration and placement of sensors is crucial for reliable fall detection, indoor localization, and activity recognition in assisted living spaces. We propose a novel, sample-efficient approach to find a high-quality sensor placement in an arbitrary indoor space based on grey-box Bayesian optimization and simulation-based evaluation. Our key technical contribution lies in capturing domain-specific knowledge about the spatial distribution of activities and incorporating it into the iterative selection of query points in Bayesian optimization. Considering two simulated indoor environments and a real-world dataset containing human activities and sensor triggers, we show that our proposed method performs better compared to state-of-the-art black-box optimization techniques in identifying high-quality sensor placements, leading to an accurate activity recognition model in terms of F1-score, while also requiring a significantly lower (51.3% on average) number of expensive function queries.

Grey-Box Bayesian Optimization for Sensor Placement in Assisted Living Environments

Emergency and non-emergency response systems are essential services provided by local governments and critical to protecting lives, the environment, and property. The effective handling of (non-)emergency calls is critical for public safety and well-being. By reducing the burden through non-emergency callers, residents in critical need of assistance through 911 will receive a fast and effective response. Collaborating with the Department of Emergency Communications (DEC) in Nashville, we analyzed 11,796 non-emergency call recordings and developed Auto311, the first automated system to handle 311 non-emergency calls, which (1) effectively and dynamically predicts ongoing non-emergency incident types to generate tailored case reports during the call; (2) itemizes essential information from dialogue contexts to complete the generated reports; and (3) strategically structures system-caller dialogues with optimized confidence. We used real-world data to evaluate the system's effectiveness and deployability. The experimental results indicate that the system effectively predicts incident type with an average F-1 score of 92.54%. Moreover, the system successfully itemizes critical information from relevant contexts to complete reports, evincing a 0.93 average consistency score compared to the ground truth. Additionally, emulations demonstrate that the system effectively decreases conversation turns as the utterance size gets more extensive and categorizes the ongoing call with 94.49% mean accuracy.

Auto311: A Confidence-Guided Automated System for Non-emergency Call | VIDEO

Confidence calibration in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) aims to align a model's predicted confidence with its actual accuracy. Recent studies have indicated that GNNs exhibit an under-confidence bias, which contrasts the over-confidence bias commonly observed in deep neural networks. However, our deeper investigation into this topic reveals that not all GNNs exhibit this behavior. Upon closer examination of message passing in GNNs, we found a clear link between message aggregation and confidence levels. Specifically, GNNs with extensive message aggregation, often seen in deep architectures or when leveraging large amounts of labeled data, tend to exhibit overconfidence. This overconfidence can be attributed to factors like over-learning and over-smoothing. Conversely, GNNs with fewer layers, known for their balanced message passing and superior node representation, may exhibit under-confidence. To counter these confidence biases, we introduce the Adaptive Unified Label Smoothing (AU-LS) technique. Our experiments show that AU-LS outperforms existing methods, addressing both over and under-confidence in various GNN scenarios.

Moderate Message Passing Improves Calibration: A Universal Way to Mitigate Confidence Bias in Graph Neural Networks

Robust autonomous driving requires agents to accurately identify unexpected areas (anomalies) in urban scenes. To this end, some critical issues remain open: how to design advisable metric to measure anomalies, and how to properly generate training samples of anomaly data? Classical effort in anomaly detection usually resorts to pixel-wise uncertainty or sample synthesis, which ignores the contextual information and sometimes requires auxiliary data with fine-grained annotations. On the contrary, in this paper, we exploit the strong context-dependent nature of segmentation task and design an energy-guided self-supervised frameworks for anomaly segmentation, which optimizes an anomaly head by maximizing likelihood of self-generated anomaly pixels. For this purpose, we design two estimators to model anomaly likelihood, one is a task-agnostic binary estimator and the other depicts the likelihood as residual of task-oriented joint energy. Based on proposed estimators, we devise an adaptive self-supervised training framework, which exploits the contextual reliance and estimated likelihood to refine mask annotations in anomaly areas. We conduct extensive experiments on challenging Fishyscapes and Road Anomaly benchmarks, demonstrating that without any auxiliary data or synthetic models, our method can still achieves comparable performance to supervised competitors. Code is available at https://github.com/yuanpengtu/SLEEG.

Self-Supervised Likelihood Estimation with Energy Guidance for Anomaly Segmentation in Urban Scenes | VIDEO

This paper reveals a data bias issue that can profoundly hinder the performance of machine learning models in malicious URL detection. We describe how such bias can be diagnosed using interpretable machine learning techniques and further argue that such biases naturally exist in the real world security data for training a classification model. To counteract these challenges, we propose a debiased training strategy that can be applied to most deep-learning based models to alleviate the negative effects of the biased features. The solution is based on the technique of adversarial training to train deep neural networks learning invariant embedding from biased data. Through extensive experimentation, we substantiate that our innovative strategy fosters superior generalization capabilities across both CNN-based and RNN-based detection models. The findings presented in this work not only expose a latent issue in the field but also provide an actionable remedy, marking a significant step forward in the pursuit of more reliable and robust malicious URL detection.

Toward More Generalized Malicious URL Detection Models

Adversarial attacks, \ie generating adversarial perturbations with a small magnitude to deceive deep neural networks, are important for investigating and improving model trustworthiness. Traditionally, the topic was scoped within 2D images without considering 3D multiview information. Benefiting from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), one can easily reconstruct a 3D scene with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) from given 2D views and synthesize photo-realistic renderings of novel vantages. This opens up a door to discussing the possibility of undertaking to attack multiview NeRF network with downstream tasks from different rendering angles, which we denote Neural Radiance Fiels-based multiview adversarial Attack (NeRFail). The goal is, given one scene and a subset of views, to deceive the recognition results of agnostic view angles as well as given views. To do so, we propose a transformation mapping from pixels to 3D points such that our attack generates multiview adversarial perturbations by attacking a subset of images with different views, intending to prevent the downstream classifier from correctly predicting images rendered by NeRF from other views. Experiments show that our multiview adversarial perturbations successfully obfuscate the downstream classifier at both known and unknown views. Notably, when retraining another NeRF on the perturbed training data, we show that the perturbation can be inherited and reproduced. The code can be found at https://github.com/jiang-wenxiang/NeRFail.

NeRFail: Neural Radiance Fields-Based Multiview Adversarial Attack

Recent research has introduced several approaches to formally verify the robustness of neural network models against perturbations in their inputs, such as the ones that occur in adversarial attacks. At the same time, this particular verification task is known to be computationally challenging. More specifically, assessing the robustness of a neural network against input perturbations can easily take several hours of compute time per input vector, even when using state-of-the-art verification approaches. In light of this, it becomes challenging to select from a given set of neural network models the one that is best in terms of robust accuracy, i.e., the fraction of instances for which the model is known to be robust against adversarial perturbations, especially when given limited computing resources.
To tackle this problem, we propose a racing method specifically adapted to the domain of robustness verification. This racing method utilises Delta-values, which can be seen as an efficiently computable proxy for the distance of a given input to a neural network model to the decision boundary. We present statistical evidence indicating significant differences in the empirical cumulative distribution between robust and non-robust inputs as a function of Delta-values. Using this information, we show that it is possible to reliably expose vulnerabilities in the model with relatively few input iterations. Overall, when applied to selecting the most robust network from sets of 31 MNIST and 27 CIFAR-10 networks, our proposed method achieves speedups of a factor of 108 and 42, respectively, in terms of cumulative running time compared to standard local robustness verification on the complete testing sets.

Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning

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Identifying and Addressing Disparities in Public Libraries with Bayesian Latent Variable Modeling

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