Debiasing Community Detection: The Importance of Lowly-Connected Nodes

Community detection is an important task in social network analysis, allowing us to identify and understand the communities within the social structures. However, many community detection approaches either fail to assign low degree (or lowly-connected) users to communities, or assign them to trivially small communities that prevent them from being included in analysis. In this work, we investigate how excluding these users can bias analysis results. We then introduce an approach that is more inclusive for lowly-connected users by incorporating them into larger groups. Experiments show that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in terms of F1 and Jaccard similarity scores while reducing the bias towards low-degree users

Exacerbating Algorithmic Bias through Fairness Attacks

Algorithmic fairness has attracted significant attention in recent years, with many quantitative measures suggested for characterizing the fairness of different machine learning algorithms. Despite this interest, the robustness of those fairness measures with respect to an intentional adversarial attack has not been properly addressed. Indeed, most adversarial machine learning has focused on the impact of malicious attacks on the accuracy of the system, without any regard to the system's fairness. We propose new types of data poisoning attacks where an adversary intentionally targets the fairness of a system. Specifically, we propose two families of attacks that target fairness measures. In the anchoring attack, we skew the decision boundary by placing poisoned points near specific target points to bias the outcome. In the influence attack on fairness, we aim to maximize the covariance between the sensitive attributes and the decision outcome and affect the fairness of the model. We conduct extensive experiments that indicate the effectiveness of our proposed attacks

FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming

Warning: this paper contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive. As generative models become available for public use in various applications, testing and analyzing vulnerabilities of these models has become a priority. Here we propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. Our framework uses in-context learning in a feedback loop to red team models and trigger them into unsafe content generation. We propose different in-context attack strategies to automatically learn effective and diverse adversarial prompts for text-to-image models. Our experiments demonstrate that compared to baseline approaches, our proposed strategy is significantly more effective in exposing vulnerabilities in Stable Diffusion (SD) model, even when the latter is enhanced with safety features. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for red teaming text-to-text models, resulting in significantly higher toxic response generation rate compared to previously reported numbers

Is the Elephant Flying? Resolving Ambiguities in Text-to-Image Generative Models

Natural language often contains ambiguities that can lead to misinterpretation and miscommunication. While humans can handle ambiguities effectively by asking clarifying questions and/or relying on contextual cues and common-sense knowledge, resolving ambiguities can be notoriously hard for machines. In this work, we study ambiguities that arise in text-to-image generative models. We curate a benchmark dataset covering different types of ambiguities that occur in these systems. We then propose a framework to mitigate ambiguities in the prompts given to the systems by soliciting clarifications from the user. Through automatic and human evaluations, we show the effectiveness of our framework in generating more faithful images aligned with human intention in the presence of ambiguities