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Solon Barocas

9 accepted papers

2026

Statistical Guarantees in the Search for Less Discriminatory Algorithms

ICLR 2026poster

Recent scholarship has argued that firms building data-driven decision systems in high-stakes domains like employment, credit, and housing should search for “less discriminatory algorithms” (LDAs) (Black et al., 2023). That is, for a given decision problem, firms considering deploying a model should…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Comparison requires valid measurement: Rethinking attack success rate comparisons in AI red teaming

NeurIPS 2025poster

In this position paper we argue that conclusions drawn about relative system safety or attack method efficacy via AI red teaming are often not supported by evidence provided by attack success rate (ASR) comparisons. We show, through conceptual, theoretical, and empirical contributions, that many c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy and Research

NeurIPS 2025oral

"Machine unlearning" is a popular proposed solution for mitigating the existence of content in an AI model that is problematic for legal or moral reasons, including privacy, copyright, safety, and more. For example, unlearning is often invoked as a solution for removing the effects of specific infor…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Position: Evaluating Generative AI Systems Is a Social Science Measurement Challenge

ICML 2025poster

The measurement tasks involved in evaluating generative AI (GenAI) systems lack sufficient scientific rigor, leading to what has been described as "a tangle of sloppy tests [and] apples-to-oranges comparisons" (Roose, 2024). In this position paper, we argue that the ML community would benefit from l…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor

NeurIPS 2025poster

In AI research and practice, rigor remains largely understood in terms of methodological rigor---such as whether mathematical, statistical, or computational methods are correctly applied. We argue that this narrow conception of rigor has contributed to the concerns raised by the responsible AI commu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Validating LLM-as-a-Judge Systems under Rating Indeterminacy

NeurIPS 2025poster

The LLM-as-a-judge paradigm, in which a judge LLM system replaces human raters in rating the outputs of other generative AI (GenAI) systems, plays a critical role in scaling and standardizing GenAI evaluations. To validate such judge systems, evaluators assess human--judge agreement by first collect…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Arbitrariness and Social Prediction: The Confounding Role of Variance in Fair Classification

AAAI 2024technical

Variance in predictions across different trained models is a significant, under-explored source of error in fair binary classification. In practice, the variance on some data examples is so large that decisions can be effectively arbitrary. To investigate this problem, we take an experimental approa…

2023

Taxonomizing and Measuring Representational Harms: A Look at Image Tagging

AAAI 2023technical

In this paper, we examine computational approaches for measuring the "fairness" of image tagging systems, finding that they cluster into five distinct categories, each with its own analytic foundation. We also identify a range of normative concerns that are often collapsed under the terms "unfairnes…

Cited by 52SourcePDFScholar