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John P Dickerson

30 accepted papers

2025

Robust Fair Clustering with Group Membership Uncertainty Sets

AISTATS 2025poster

We study the canonical fair clustering problem where each cluster is constrained to have close to population-level representation of each group. Despite significant attention, the salient issue of having incomplete knowledge about the group membership of each point has been superficially addressed.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Style Outweighs Substance: Failure Modes of LLM Judges in Alignment Benchmarking

ICLR 2025poster

The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked an explosion of interest in post-training and an avalanche of new preference optimization (PO) methods. These methods claim superior alignment by virtue of better correspondence with human pairwise preferences, often measured by LLM-judges. In this wor…

2023

Diffused Redundancy in Pre-trained Representations

NeurIPS 2023poster

Representations learned by pre-training a neural network on a large dataset are increasingly used successfully to perform a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we take a closer look at how features are encoded in such pre-trained representations. We find that learned representations in a give…

2023

Do Invariances in Deep Neural Networks Align with Human Perception?

AAAI 2023technical

An evaluation criterion for safe and trustworthy deep learning is how well the invariances captured by representations of deep neural networks (DNNs) are shared with humans. We identify challenges in measuring these invariances. Prior works used gradient-based methods to generate identically represe…

2023

Doubly Constrained Fair Clustering

NeurIPS 2023poster

The remarkable attention which fair clustering has received in the last few years has resulted in a significant number of different notions of fairness. Despite the fact that these notions are well-justified, they are often motivated and studied in a disjoint manner where one fairness desideratum is…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fair, Polylog-Approximate Low-Cost Hierarchical Clustering

NeurIPS 2023poster

Research in fair machine learning, and particularly clustering, has been crucial in recent years given the many ethical controversies that modern intelligent systems have posed. Ahmadian et al. [2020] established the study of fairness in hierarchical clustering, a stronger, more structured variant o…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Generalized Reductions: Making any Hierarchical Clustering Fair and Balanced with Low Cost

ICML 2023poster

Clustering is a fundamental building block of modern statistical analysis pipelines. Fair clustering has seen much attention from the machine learning community in recent years. We are some of the first to study fairness in the context of hierarchical clustering, after the results of Ahmadian et al.…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Rawlsian Fairness in Online Bipartite Matching: Two-Sided, Group, and Individual

AAAI 2023technical

Online bipartite-matching platforms are ubiquitous and find applications in important areas such as crowdsourcing and ridesharing. In the most general form, the platform consists of three entities: two sides to be matched and a platform operator that decides the matching. The design of algorithms fo…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2023

Rethinking Bias Mitigation: Fairer Architectures Make for Fairer Face Recognition

NeurIPS 2023oral

Face recognition systems are widely deployed in safety-critical applications, including law enforcement, yet they exhibit bias across a range of socio-demographic dimensions, such as gender and race. Conventional wisdom dictates that model biases arise from biased training data. As a consequence,…

2023

Reward Scale Robustness for Proximal Policy Optimization via DreamerV3 Tricks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Most reinforcement learning methods rely heavily on dense, well-normalized environment rewards. DreamerV3 recently introduced a model-based method with a number of tricks that mitigate these limitations, achieving state-of-the-art on a wide range of benchmarks with a single set of hyperparameters. T…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

A New Notion of Individually Fair Clustering: $α$-Equitable $k$-Center

AISTATS 2022poster

Clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised machine learning, and due to its numerous societal implications fair variants of it have recently received significant attention. In this work we introduce a novel definition of individual fairness for clustering problems. Specifically, in our mode…

2022

Amortized Generation of Sequential Algorithmic Recourses for Black-Box Models

AAAI 2022technical

Explainable machine learning (ML) has gained traction in recent years due to the increasing adoption of ML-based systems in many sectors. Algorithmic Recourses (ARs) provide "what if" feedback of the form "if an input datapoint were x' instead of x, then an ML-based system's output would be y' inste…

2022

Certified Neural Network Watermarks with Randomized Smoothing

ICML 2022spotlight

Watermarking is a commonly used strategy to protect creators’ rights to digital images, videos and audio. Recently, watermarking methods have been extended to deep learning models – in principle, the watermark should be preserved when an adversary tries to copy the model. However, in practice, water…

2022

Cliff Diving: Exploring Reward Surfaces in Reinforcement Learning Environments

ICML 2022spotlight

Visualizing optimization landscapes has resulted in many fundamental insights in numeric optimization, specifically regarding novel improvements to optimization techniques. However, visualizations of the objective that reinforcement learning optimizes (the "reward surface") have only ever been gener…

2022

Learning Revenue-Maximizing Auctions With Differentiable Matching

AISTATS 2022poster

We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the network to learn strategyproof revenue-maximizing mechanisms in…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2022

Measuring Representational Robustness of Neural Networks Through Shared Invariances

ICML 2022oral

A major challenge in studying robustness in deep learning is defining the set of “meaningless” perturbations to which a given Neural Network (NN) should be invariant. Most work on robustness implicitly uses a human as the reference model to define such perturbations. Our work offers a new view on ro…

2022

On the Generalizability and Predictability of Recommender Systems

NeurIPS 2022accept

While other areas of machine learning have seen more and more automation, designing a high-performing recommender system still requires a high level of human effort. Furthermore, recent work has shown that modern recommender system algorithms do not always improve over well-tuned baselines. A natura…

2021

Fairness, Semi-Supervised Learning, and More: A General Framework for Clustering with Stochastic Pairwise Constraints

AAAI 2021technical

Metric clustering is fundamental in areas ranging from Combinatorial Optimization and Data Mining, to Machine Learning and Operations Research. However, in a variety of situations we may have additional requirements or knowledge, distinct from the underlying metric, regarding which pairs of points s…

2021

How does a Neural Network's Architecture Impact its Robustness to Noisy Labels?

NeurIPS 2021poster

Noisy labels are inevitable in large real-world datasets. In this work, we explore an area understudied by previous works --- how the network's architecture impacts its robustness to noisy labels. We provide a formal framework connecting the robustness of a network to the alignments between its arch…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2021

Indecision Modeling

AAAI 2021technical

AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act in ways which align with human values. Techniques for prefere…

2021

Just How Toxic is Data Poisoning? A Unified Benchmark for Backdoor and Data Poisoning Attacks

ICML 2021spotlight

Data poisoning and backdoor attacks manipulate training data in order to cause models to fail during inference. A recent survey of industry practitioners found that data poisoning is the number one concern among threats ranging from model stealing to adversarial attacks. However, it remains unclear…

2021

LowKey: Leveraging Adversarial Attacks to Protect Social Media Users from Facial Recognition

ICLR 2021poster

Facial recognition systems are increasingly deployed by private corporations, government agencies, and contractors for consumer services and mass surveillance programs alike. These systems are typically built by scraping social media profiles for user images. Adversarial perturbations have been pr…

Cited by 163SourcePDFScholar
2021

Optimal Kidney Exchange with Immunosuppressants

AAAI 2021technical

Algorithms for exchange of kidneys is one of the key successful applications in market design, artificial intelligence, and operations research. Potent immunosuppressant drugs suppress the body's ability to reject a transplanted organ up to the point that a transplant across blood- or tissue-type in…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2021

PreferenceNet: Encoding Human Preferences in Auction Design with Deep Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

The design of optimal auctions is a problem of interest in economics, game theory and computer science. Despite decades of effort, strategyproof, revenue-maximizing auction designs are still not known outside of restricted settings. However, recent methods using deep learning have shown some success…

2021

Scalable Equilibrium Computation in Multi-agent Influence Games on Networks

AAAI 2021technical

We provide a polynomial-time, scalable algorithm for equilibrium computation in multi-agent influence games on networks, extending work of Bindel, Kleinberg, and Oren (2015) from the single-agent to the multi-agent setting. In games of influence, agents have limited advertising budget to influence t…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2021

VQ-GNN: A Universal Framework to Scale up Graph Neural Networks using Vector Quantization

NeurIPS 2021poster

Most state-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be defined as a form of graph convolution which can be realized by message passing between direct neighbors or beyond. To scale such GNNs to large graphs, various neighbor-, layer-, or subgraph-sampling techniques are proposed to alleviate the "…

2020

An Algorithm for Multi-Attribute Diverse Matching

IJCAI 2020poster

Bipartite b-matching, where agents on one side of a market are matched to one or more agents or items on the other, is a classical model that is used in myriad application areas such as healthcare, advertising, education, and general resource allocation. Traditionally, the primary goal of such model…