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Michael Kearns

18 accepted papers

2026

Replicable Reinforcement Learning with Linear Function Approximation

ICLR 2026poster

Replication of experimental results has been a challenge faced by many scientific disciplines, including the field of machine learning. Recent work on the theory of machine learning has formalized replicability as the demand that an algorithm produce identical outcomes when executed twice on differe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Intersectional Fairness in Reinforcement Learning with Large State and Constraint Spaces

ICML 2025poster

In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple objectives simultaneously. For example, when we are intereste…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Membership Inference Attacks on Diffusion Models via Quantile Regression

ICML 2024poster

Recently, diffusion models have become popular tools for image synthesis due to their high-quality outputs. However, like other large models, they may leak private information about their training data. Here, we demonstrate a privacy vulnerability of diffusion models through a *membership inference…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function approximation and policy gradient techniques often scale po…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Reconstruction Attacks on Machine Unlearning: Simple Models are Vulnerable

NeurIPS 2024poster

Machine unlearning is motivated by principles of data autonomy. The premise is that a person can request to have their data's influence removed from deployed models, and those models should be updated as if they were retrained without the person's data. We show that these updates expose individuals…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Multicalibration as Boosting for Regression

ICML 2023oral

We study the connection between multicalibration and boosting for squared error regression. First we prove a useful characterization of multicalibration in terms of a ``swap regret'' like condition on squared error. Using this characterization, we give an exceedingly simple algorithm that can be ana…

2023

Scalable Membership Inference Attacks via Quantile Regression

NeurIPS 2023poster

Membership inference attacks are designed to determine, using black box access to trained models, whether a particular example was used in training or not. Membership inference can be formalized as a hypothesis testing problem. The most effective existing attacks estimate the distribution of some te…

2022

Mixed Differential Privacy in Computer Vision

CVPR 2022oral

We introduce AdaMix, an adaptive differentially private algorithm for training deep neural network classifiers using both private and public image data. While pre-training language models on large public datasets has enabled strong differential privacy (DP) guarantees with minor loss of accuracy, a…

Cited by 64PDFcodeScholar
2022

Private Synthetic Data for Multitask Learning and Marginal Queries

NeurIPS 2022accept

We provide a differentially private algorithm for producing synthetic data simultaneously useful for multiple tasks: marginal queries and multitask machine learning (ML). A key innovation in our algorithm is the ability to directly handle numerical features, in contrast to a number of related prior…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2021

Differentially Private Query Release Through Adaptive Projection

ICML 2021oral

We propose, implement, and evaluate a new algo-rithm for releasing answers to very large numbersof statistical queries likek-way marginals, sub-ject to differential privacy. Our algorithm makesadaptive use of a continuous relaxation of thePro-jection Mechanism, which answers queries on theprivate da…

2019

Average Individual Fairness: Algorithms, Generalization and Experiments

NeurIPS 2019oral

We propose a new family of fairness definitions for classification problems that combine some of the best properties of both statistical and individual notions of fairness. We posit not only a distribution over individuals, but also a distribution over (or collection of) classification tasks. We the…

2019

Differentially Private Fair Learning

ICML 2019oral

Motivated by settings in which predictive models may be required to be non-discriminatory with respect to certain attributes (such as race), but even collecting the sensitive attribute may be forbidden or restricted, we initiate the study of fair learning under the constraint of differential privacy…

Cited by 202SourcePDFScholar
2018

Online Learning with an Unknown Fairness Metric

NeurIPS 2018poster

We consider the problem of online learning in the linear contextual bandits setting, but in which there are also strong individual fairness constraints governed by an unknown similarity metric. These constraints demand that we select similar actions or individuals with approximately equal probabilit…

Cited by 188SourcePDFScholar
2018

Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness

ICML 2018oral

The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning fix a small collection of pre-defined groups (such as race or gender), and then ask for approximate parity of some statistic of the classifier (such as false positive rate) across these groups. Constraints of this form are susceptible to fai…

2017

Fairness in Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2017poster

We initiate the study of fairness in reinforcement learning, where the actions of a learning algorithm may affect its environment and future rewards. Our fairness constraint requires that an algorithm never prefers one action over another if the long-term (discounted) reward of choosing the latter a…

Cited by 241SourcePDFScholar
2016

Fairness in Learning: Classic and Contextual Bandits

NeurIPS 2016poster

We introduce the study of fairness in multi-armed bandit problems. Our fairness definition demands that, given a pool of applicants, a worse applicant is never favored over a better one, despite a learning algorithm’s uncertainty over the true payoffs. In the classic stochastic bandits problem we pr…

Cited by 588SourcePDFScholar