Tag Archives: RAI-HCT Highlights

Responsible AI at Google Research: Context in AI Research (CAIR)

Posted by Katherine Heller, Research Scientist, Google Research, on behalf of the CAIR Team

Artificial intelligence (AI) and related machine learning (ML) technologies are increasingly influential in the world around us, making it imperative that we consider the potential impacts on society and individuals in all aspects of the technology that we create. To these ends, the Context in AI Research (CAIR) team develops novel AI methods in the context of the entire AI pipeline: from data to end-user feedback. The pipeline for building an AI system typically starts with data collection, followed by designing a model to run on that data, deployment of the model in the real world, and lastly, compiling and incorporation of human feedback. Originating in the health space, and now expanded to additional areas, the work of the CAIR team impacts every aspect of this pipeline. While specializing in model building, we have a particular focus on building systems with responsibility in mind, including fairness, robustness, transparency, and inclusion.


Data

The CAIR team focuses on understanding the data on which ML systems are built. Improving the standards for the transparency of ML datasets is instrumental in our work. First, we employ documentation frameworks to elucidate dataset and model characteristics as guidance in the development of data and model documentation techniques — Datasheets for Datasets and Model Cards for Model Reporting.

For example, health datasets are highly sensitive and yet can have high impact. For this reason, we developed Healthsheets, a health-contextualized adaptation of a Datasheet. Our motivation for developing a health-specific sheet lies in the limitations of existing regulatory frameworks for AI and health. Recent research suggests that data privacy regulation and standards (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act) do not ensure ethical collection, documentation, and use of data. Healthsheets aim to fill this gap in ethical dataset analysis. The development of Healthsheets was done in collaboration with many stakeholders in relevant job roles, including clinical, legal and regulatory, bioethics, privacy, and product.

Further, we studied how Datasheets and Healthsheets could serve as diagnostic tools that surface the limitations and strengths of datasets. Our aim was to start a conversation in the community and tailor Healthsheets to dynamic healthcare scenarios over time.

To facilitate this effort, we joined the STANDING Together initiative, a consortium that aims to develop international, consensus-based standards for documentation of diversity and representation within health datasets and to provide guidance on how to mitigate risk of bias translating to harm and health inequalities. Being part of this international, interdisciplinary partnership that spans academic, clinical, regulatory, policy, industry, patient, and charitable organizations worldwide enables us to engage in the conversation about responsibility in AI for healthcare internationally. Over 250 stakeholders from across 32 countries have contributed to refining the standards.

Healthsheets and STANDING Together: towards health data documentation and standards.

Model

When ML systems are deployed in the real world, they may fail to behave in expected ways, making poor predictions in new contexts. Such failures can occur for a myriad of reasons and can carry negative consequences, especially within the context of healthcare. Our work aims to identify situations where unexpected model behavior may be discovered, before it becomes a substantial problem, and to mitigate the unexpected and undesired consequences.

Much of the CAIR team’s modeling work focuses on identifying and mitigating when models are underspecified. We show that models that perform well on held-out data drawn from a training domain are not equally robust or fair under distribution shift because the models vary in the extent to which they rely on spurious correlations. This poses a risk to users and practitioners because it can be difficult to anticipate model instability using standard model evaluation practices. We have demonstrated that this concern arises in several domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, medical imaging, and prediction from electronic health records.

We have also shown how to use knowledge of causal mechanisms to diagnose and mitigate fairness and robustness issues in new contexts. Knowledge of causal structure allows practitioners to anticipate the generalizability of fairness properties under distribution shift in real-world medical settings. Further, investigating the capability for specific causal pathways, or “shortcuts”, to introduce bias in ML systems, we demonstrate how to identify cases where shortcut learning leads to predictions in ML systems that are unintentionally dependent on sensitive attributes (e.g., age, sex, race). We have shown how to use causal directed acyclic graphs to adapt ML systems to changing environments under complex forms of distribution shift. Our team is currently investigating how a causal interpretation of different forms of bias, including selection bias, label bias, and measurement error, motivates the design of techniques to mitigate bias during model development and evaluation.

Shortcut Learning: For some models, age may act as a shortcut in classification when using medical images.

The CAIR team focuses on developing methodology to build more inclusive models broadly. For example, we also have work on the design of participatory systems, which allows individuals to choose whether to disclose sensitive attributes, such as race, when an ML system makes predictions. We hope that our methodological research positively impacts the societal understanding of inclusivity in AI method development.


Deployment

The CAIR team aims to build technology that improves the lives of all people through the use of mobile device technology. We aim to reduce suffering from health conditions, address systemic inequality, and enable transparent device-based data collection. As consumer technology, such as fitness trackers and mobile phones, become central in data collection for health, we explored the use of these technologies within the context of chronic disease, in particular, for multiple sclerosis (MS). We developed new data collection mechanisms and predictions that we hope will eventually revolutionize patient’s chronic disease management, clinical trials, medical reversals and drug development.

First, we extended the open-source FDA MyStudies platform, which is used to create clinical study apps, to make it easier for anyone to run their own studies and collect good quality data, in a trusted and safe way. Our improvements include zero-config setups, so that researchers can prototype their study in a day, cross-platform app generation through the use of Flutter and, most importantly, an emphasis on accessibility so that all patient’s voices are heard. We are excited to announce this work has now been open sourced as an extension to the original FDA-Mystudies platform. You can start setting up your own studies today!

To test this platform, we built a prototype app, which we call MS Signals, that uses surveys to interface with patients in a novel consumer setting. We collaborated with the National MS Society to recruit participants for a user experience study for the app, with the goal of reducing dropout rates and improving the platform further.

MS Signals app screenshots. Left: Study welcome screen. Right: Questionnaire.

Once data is collected, researchers could potentially use it to drive the frontier of ML research in MS. In a separate study, we established a research collaboration with the Duke Department of Neurology and demonstrated that ML models can accurately predict the incidence of high-severity symptoms within three months using continuously collected data from mobile apps. Results suggest that the trained models can be used by clinicians to evaluate the symptom trajectory of MS participants, which may inform decision making for administering interventions.

The CAIR team has been involved in the deployment of many other systems, for both internal and external use. For example, we have also partnered with Learning Ally to build a book recommendation system for children with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia. We hope that our work positively impacts future product development.


Human feedback

As ML models become ubiquitous throughout the developed world, it can be far too easy to leave voices in less developed countries behind. A priority of the CAIR team is to bridge this gap, develop deep relationships with communities, and work together to address ML-related concerns through community-driven approaches.

One of the ways we are doing this is through working with grassroots organizations for ML, such as Sisonkebiotik, an open and inclusive community of researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts at the intersection of ML and healthcare working together to build capacity and drive forward research initiatives in Africa. We worked in collaboration with the Sisonkebiotik community to detail limitations of historical top-down approaches for global health, and suggested complementary health-based methods, specifically those of grassroots participatory communities (GPCs). We jointly created a framework for ML and global health, laying out a practical roadmap towards setting up, growing and maintaining GPCs, based on common values across various GPCs such as Masakhane, Sisonkebiotik and Ro’ya.

We are engaging with open initiatives to better understand the role, perceptions and use cases of AI for health in non-western countries through human feedback, with an initial focus in Africa. Together with Ghana NLP, we have worked to detail the need to better understand algorithmic fairness and bias in health in non-western contexts. We recently launched a study to expand on this work using human feedback.

Biases along the ML pipeline and their associations with African-contextualized axes of disparities.

The CAIR team is committed to creating opportunities to hear more perspectives in AI development. We partnered with Sisonkebiotik to co-organize the Data Science for Health Workshop at Deep Learning Indaba 2023 in Ghana. Everyone’s voice is crucial to developing a better future using AI technology.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Negar Rostamzadeh, Stephen Pfohl, Subhrajit Roy, Diana Mincu, Chintan Ghate, Mercy Asiedu, Emily Salkey, Alexander D’Amour, Jessica Schrouff, Chirag Nagpal, Eltayeb Ahmed, Lev Proleev, Natalie Harris, Mohammad Havaei, Ben Hutchinson, Andrew Smart, Awa Dieng, Mahima Pushkarna, Sanmi Koyejo, Kerrie Kauer, Do Hee Park, Lee Hartsell, Jennifer Graves, Berk Ustun, Hailey Joren, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell for their contributions and influence, as well as our many friends and collaborators at Learning Ally, National MS Society, Duke University Hospital, STANDING Together, Sisonkebiotik, and Masakhane.

Source: Google AI Blog


Responsible AI at Google Research: Perception Fairness

Posted by Susanna Ricco and Utsav Prabhu, co-leads, Perception Fairness Team, Google Research

Google’s Responsible AI research is built on a foundation of collaboration — between teams with diverse backgrounds and expertise, between researchers and product developers, and ultimately with the community at large. The Perception Fairness team drives progress by combining deep subject-matter expertise in both computer vision and machine learning (ML) fairness with direct connections to the researchers building the perception systems that power products across Google and beyond. Together, we are working to intentionally design our systems to be inclusive from the ground up, guided by Google’s AI Principles.

Perception Fairness research spans the design, development, and deployment of advanced multimodal models including the latest foundation and generative models powering Google's products.

Our team's mission is to advance the frontiers of fairness and inclusion in multimodal ML systems, especially related to foundation models and generative AI. This encompasses core technology components including classification, localization, captioning, retrieval, visual question answering, text-to-image or text-to-video generation, and generative image and video editing. We believe that fairness and inclusion can and should be top-line performance goals for these applications. Our research is focused on unlocking novel analyses and mitigations that enable us to proactively design for these objectives throughout the development cycle. We answer core questions, such as: How can we use ML to responsibly and faithfully model human perception of demographic, cultural, and social identities in order to promote fairness and inclusion? What kinds of system biases (e.g., underperforming on images of people with certain skin tones) can we measure and how can we use these metrics to design better algorithms? How can we build more inclusive algorithms and systems and react quickly when failures occur?


Measuring representation of people in media

ML systems that can edit, curate or create images or videos can affect anyone exposed to their outputs, shaping or reinforcing the beliefs of viewers around the world. Research to reduce representational harms, such as reinforcing stereotypes or denigrating or erasing groups of people, requires a deep understanding of both the content and the societal context. It hinges on how different observers perceive themselves, their communities, or how others are represented. There's considerable debate in the field regarding which social categories should be studied with computational tools and how to do so responsibly. Our research focuses on working toward scalable solutions that are informed by sociology and social psychology, are aligned with human perception, embrace the subjective nature of the problem, and enable nuanced measurement and mitigation. One example is our research on differences in human perception and annotation of skin tone in images using the Monk Skin Tone scale.

Our tools are also used to study representation in large-scale content collections. Through our Media Understanding for Social Exploration (MUSE) project, we've partnered with academic researchers, nonprofit organizations, and major consumer brands to understand patterns in mainstream media and advertising content. We first published this work in 2017, with a co-authored study analyzing gender equity in Hollywood movies. Since then, we've increased the scale and depth of our analyses. In 2019, we released findings based on over 2.7 million YouTube advertisements. In the latest study, we examine representation across intersections of perceived gender presentation, perceived age, and skin tone in over twelve years of popular U.S. television shows. These studies provide insights for content creators and advertisers and further inform our own research.

An illustration (not actual data) of computational signals that can be analyzed at scale to reveal representational patterns in media collections. [Video Collection / Getty Images]

Moving forward, we're expanding the ML fairness concepts on which we focus and the domains in which they are responsibly applied. Looking beyond photorealistic images of people, we are working to develop tools that model the representation of communities and cultures in illustrations, abstract depictions of humanoid characters, and even images with no people in them at all. Finally, we need to reason about not just who is depicted, but how they are portrayed — what narrative is communicated through the surrounding image content, the accompanying text, and the broader cultural context.


Analyzing bias properties of perceptual systems

Building advanced ML systems is complex, with multiple stakeholders informing various criteria that decide product behavior. Overall quality has historically been defined and measured using summary statistics (like overall accuracy) over a test dataset as a proxy for user experience. But not all users experience products in the same way.

Perception Fairness enables practical measurement of nuanced system behavior beyond summary statistics, and makes these metrics core to the system quality that directly informs product behaviors and launch decisions. This is often much harder than it seems. Distilling complex bias issues (e.g., disparities in performance across intersectional subgroups or instances of stereotype reinforcement) to a small number of metrics without losing important nuance is extremely challenging. Another challenge is balancing the interplay between fairness metrics and other product metrics (e.g., user satisfaction, accuracy, latency), which are often phrased as conflicting despite being compatible. It is common for researchers to describe their work as optimizing an "accuracy-fairness" tradeoff when in reality widespread user satisfaction is aligned with meeting fairness and inclusion objectives.

We built and released the MIAP dataset as part of Open Images, leveraging our research on perception of socially relevant concepts and detection of biased behavior in complex systems to create a resource that furthers ML fairness research in computer vision. Original photo credits — left: Boston Public Library; middle: jen robinson; right: Garin Fons; all used with permission under the CC- BY 2.0 license.

To these ends, our team focuses on two broad research directions. First, democratizing access to well-understood and widely-applicable fairness analysis tooling, engaging partner organizations in adopting them into product workflows, and informing leadership across the company in interpreting results. This work includes developing broad benchmarks, curating widely-useful high-quality test datasets and tooling centered around techniques such as sliced analysis and counterfactual testing — often building on the core representation signals work described earlier. Second, advancing novel approaches towards fairness analytics — including partnering with product efforts that may result in breakthrough findings or inform launch strategy.


Advancing AI responsibly

Our work does not stop with analyzing model behavior. Rather, we use this as a jumping-off point for identifying algorithmic improvements in collaboration with other researchers and engineers on product teams. Over the past year we've launched upgraded components that power Search and Memories features in Google Photos, leading to more consistent performance and drastically improving robustness through added layers that keep mistakes from cascading through the system. We are working on improving ranking algorithms in Google Images to diversify representation. We updated algorithms that may reinforce historical stereotypes, using additional signals responsibly, such that it’s more likely for everyone to see themselves reflected in Search results and find what they're looking for.

This work naturally carries over to the world of generative AI, where models can create collections of images or videos seeded from image and text prompts and can answer questions about images and videos. We're excited about the potential of these technologies to deliver new experiences to users and as tools to further our own research. To enable this, we're collaborating across the research and responsible AI communities to develop guardrails that mitigate failure modes. We’re leveraging our tools for understanding representation to power scalable benchmarks that can be combined with human feedback, and investing in research from pre-training through deployment to steer the models to generate higher quality, more inclusive, and more controllable output. We want these models to inspire people, producing diverse outputs, translating concepts without relying on tropes or stereotypes, and providing consistent behaviors and responses across counterfactual variations of prompts.


Opportunities and ongoing work

Despite over a decade of focused work, the field of perception fairness technologies still seems like a nascent and fast-growing space, rife with opportunities for breakthrough techniques. We continue to see opportunities to contribute technical advances backed by interdisciplinary scholarship. The gap between what we can measure in images versus the underlying aspects of human identity and expression is large — closing this gap will require increasingly complex media analytics solutions. Data metrics that indicate true representation, situated in the appropriate context and heeding a diversity of viewpoints, remains an open challenge for us. Can we reach a point where we can reliably identify depictions of nuanced stereotypes, continually update them to reflect an ever-changing society, and discern situations in which they could be offensive? Algorithmic advances driven by human feedback point a promising path forward.

Recent focus on AI safety and ethics in the context of modern large model development has spurred new ways of thinking about measuring systemic biases. We are exploring multiple avenues to use these models — along with recent developments in concept-based explainability methods, causal inference methods, and cutting-edge UX research — to quantify and minimize undesired biased behaviors. We look forward to tackling the challenges ahead and developing technology that is built for everybody.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank every member of the Perception Fairness team, and all of our collaborators.

Source: Google AI Blog


Responsible AI at Google Research: AI for Social Good

Posted by Jimmy Tobin and Katrin Tomanek, Software Engineers, Google Research, AI for Social Good

Google’s AI for Social Good team consists of researchers, engineers, volunteers, and others with a shared focus on positive social impact. Our mission is to demonstrate AI’s societal benefit by enabling real-world value, with projects spanning work in public health, accessibility, crisis response, climate and energy, and nature and society. We believe that the best way to drive positive change in underserved communities is by partnering with change-makers and the organizations they serve.

In this blog post we discuss work done by Project Euphonia, a team within AI for Social Good, that aims to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) for people with disordered speech. For people with typical speech, an ASR model’s word error rate (WER) can be less than 10%. But for people with disordered speech patterns, such as stuttering, dysarthria and apraxia, the WER could reach 50% or even 90% depending on the etiology and severity. To help address this problem, we worked with more than 1,000 participants to collect over 1,000 hours of disordered speech samples and used the data to show that ASR personalization is a viable avenue for bridging the performance gap for users with disordered speech. We've shown that personalization can be successful with as little as 3-4 minutes of training speech using layer freezing techniques.

This work led to the development of Project Relate for anyone with atypical speech who could benefit from a personalized speech model. Built in partnership with Google’s Speech team, Project Relate enables people who find it hard to be understood by other people and technology to train their own models. People can use these personalized models to communicate more effectively and gain more independence. To make ASR more accessible and usable, we describe how we fine-tuned Google’s Universal Speech Model (USM) to better understand disordered speech out of the box, without personalization, for use with digital assistant technologies, dictation apps, and in conversations.


Addressing the challenges

Working closely with Project Relate users, it became clear that personalized models can be very useful, but for many users, recording dozens or hundreds of examples can be challenging. In addition, the personalized models did not always perform well in freeform conversation.

To address these challenges, Euphonia’s research efforts have been focusing on speaker independent ASR (SI-ASR) to make models work better out of the box for people with disordered speech so that no additional training is necessary.


Prompted Speech dataset for SI-ASR

The first step in building a robust SI-ASR model was to create representative dataset splits. We created the Prompted Speech dataset by splitting the Euphonia corpus into train, validation and test portions, while ensuring that each split spanned a range of speech impairment severity and underlying etiology and that no speakers or phrases appeared in multiple splits. The training portion consists of over 950k speech utterances from over 1,000 speakers with disordered speech. The test set contains around 5,700 utterances from over 350 speakers. Speech-language pathologists manually reviewed all of the utterances in the test set for transcription accuracy and audio quality.


Real Conversation test set

Unprompted or conversational speech differs from prompted speech in several ways. In conversation, people speak faster and enunciate less. They repeat words, repair misspoken words, and use a more expansive vocabulary that is specific and personal to themselves and their community. To improve a model for this use case, we created the Real Conversation test set to benchmark performance.

The Real Conversation test set was created with the help of trusted testers who recorded themselves speaking during conversations. The audio was reviewed, any personally identifiable information (PII) was removed, and then that data was transcribed by speech-language pathologists. The Real Conversation test set contains over 1,500 utterances from 29 speakers.


Adapting USM to disordered speech

We then tuned USM on the training split of the Euphonia Prompted Speech set to improve its performance on disordered speech. Instead of fine-tuning the full model, our tuning was based on residual adapters, a parameter-efficient tuning approach that adds tunable bottleneck layers as residuals between the transformer layers. Only these layers are tuned, while the rest of the model weights are untouched. We have previously shown that this approach works very well to adapt ASR models to disordered speech. Residual adapters were only added to the encoder layers, and the bottleneck dimension was set to 64.


Results

To evaluate the adapted USM, we compared it to older ASR models using the two test sets described above. For each test, we compare adapted USM to the pre-USM model best suited to that task: (1) For short prompted speech, we compare to Google’s production ASR model optimized for short form ASR; (2) for longer Real Conversation speech, we compare to a model trained for long form ASR. USM improvements over pre-USM models can be explained by USM’s relative size increase, 120M to 2B parameters, and other improvements discussed in the USM blog post.

Model word error rates (WER) for each test set (lower is better).

We see that the USM adapted with disordered speech significantly outperforms the other models. The adapted USM’s WER on Real Conversation is 37% better than the pre-USM model, and on the Prompted Speech test set, the adapted USM performs 53% better.

These findings suggest that the adapted USM is significantly more usable for an end user with disordered speech. We can demonstrate this improvement by looking at transcripts of Real Conversation test set recordings from a trusted tester of Euphonia and Project Relate (see below).


Audio1    Ground Truth    Pre-USM ASR    Adapted USM
                    
   I now have an Xbox adaptive controller on my lap.    i now have a lot and that consultant on my mouth    i now had an xbox adapter controller on my lamp.
                    
   I've been talking for quite a while now. Let's see.    quite a while now    i've been talking for quite a while now.
Example audio and transcriptions of a trusted tester’s speech from the Real Conversation test set.

A comparison of the Pre-USM and adapted USM transcripts revealed some key advantages:

  • The first example shows that Adapted USM is better at recognizing disordered speech patterns. The baseline misses key words like “XBox” and “controller” that are important for a listener to understand what they are trying to say.
  • The second example is a good example of how deletions are a primary issue with ASR models that are not trained with disordered speech. Though the baseline model did transcribe a portion correctly, a large part of the utterance was not transcribed, losing the speaker’s intended message.

Conclusion

We believe that this work is an important step towards making speech recognition more accessible to people with disordered speech. We are continuing to work on improving the performance of our models. With the rapid advancements in ASR, we aim to ensure people with disordered speech benefit as well.


Acknowledgements

Key contributors to this project include Fadi Biadsy, Michael Brenner, Julie Cattiau, Richard Cave, Amy Chung-Yu Chou, Dotan Emanuel, Jordan Green, Rus Heywood, Pan-Pan Jiang, Anton Kast, Marilyn Ladewig, Bob MacDonald, Philip Nelson, Katie Seaver, Joel Shor, Jimmy Tobin, Katrin Tomanek, and Subhashini Venugopalan. We gratefully acknowledge the support Project Euphonia received from members of the USM research team including Yu Zhang, Wei Han, Nanxin Chen, and many others. Most importantly, we wanted to say a huge thank you to the 2,200+ participants who recorded speech samples and the many advocacy groups who helped us connect with these participants.

1Audio volume has been adjusted for ease of listening, but the original files would be more consistent with those used in training and would have pauses, silences, variable volume, etc. ↩

Source: Google AI Blog


Responsible AI at Google Research: PAIR

Posted by Lucas Dixon and Michael Terry, co-leads, PAIR, Google Research

PAIR (People + AI Research) first launched in 2017 with the belief that “AI can go much further — and be more useful to all of us — if we build systems with people in mind at the start of the process.” We continue to focus on making AI more understandable, interpretable, fun, and usable by more people around the world. It’s a mission that is particularly timely given the emergence of generative AI and chatbots.

Today, PAIR is part of the Responsible AI and Human-Centered Technology team within Google Research, and our work spans this larger research space: We advance foundational research on human-AI interaction (HAI) and machine learning (ML); we publish educational materials, including the PAIR Guidebook and Explorables (such as the recent Explorable looking at how and why models sometimes make incorrect predictions confidently); and we develop software tools like the Learning Interpretability Tool to help people understand and debug ML behaviors. Our inspiration this year is "changing the way people think about what THEY can do with AI.” This vision is inspired by the rapid emergence of generative AI technologies, such as large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots like Bard, and new generative media models like Google's Imagen, Parti, and MusicLM. In this blog post, we review recent PAIR work that is changing the way we engage with AI.


Generative AI research

Generative AI is creating a lot of excitement, and PAIR is involved in a range of related research, from using language models to create generative agents to studying how artists adopted generative image models like Imagen and Parti. These latter "text-to-image" models let a person input a text-based description of an image for the model to generate (e.g., "a gingerbread house in a forest in a cartoony style"). In a forthcoming paper titled “The Prompt Artists” (to appear in Creativity and Cognition 2023), we found that users of generative image models strive not only to create beautiful images, but also to create unique, innovative styles. To help achieve these styles, some would even seek unique vocabulary to help develop their visual style. For example, they may visit architectural blogs to learn what domain-specific vocabulary they can adopt to help produce distinctive images of buildings.

We are also researching solutions to challenges faced by prompt creators who, with generative AI, are essentially programming without using a programming language. As an example, we developed new methods for extracting semantically meaningful structure from natural language prompts. We have applied these structures to prompt editors to provide features similar to those found in other programming environments, such as semantic highlighting, autosuggest, and structured data views.

The growth of generative LLMs has also opened up new techniques to solve important long-standing problems. Agile classifiers are one approach we’re taking to leverage the semantic and syntactic strengths of LLMs to solve classification problems related to safer online discourse, such as nimbly blocking newer types of toxic language as quickly as it may evolve online. The big advance here is the ability to develop high quality classifiers from very small datasets — as small as 80 examples. This suggests a positive future for online discourse and better moderation of it: instead of collecting millions of examples to attempt to create universal safety classifiers for all use cases over months or years, more agile classifiers might be created by individuals or small organizations and tailored for their specific use cases, and iterated on and adapted in the time-span of a day (e.g., to block a new kind of harassment being received or to correct unintended biases in models). As an example of their utility, these methods recently won a SemEval competition to identify and explain sexism.

We've also developed new state-of-the-art explainability methods to identify the role of training data on model behaviors and misbehaviours. By combining training data attribution methods with agile classifiers, we also found that we can identify mislabelled training examples. This makes it possible to reduce the noise in training data, leading to significant improvements on model accuracy.

Collectively, these methods are critical to help the scientific community improve generative models. They provide techniques for fast and effective content moderation and dialogue safety methods that help support creators whose content is the basis for generative models' amazing outcomes. In addition, they provide direct tools to help debug model misbehavior which leads to better generation.


Visualization and education

To lower barriers in understanding ML-related work, we regularly design and publish highly visual, interactive online essays, called AI Explorables, that provide accessible, hands-on ways to learn about key ideas in ML. For example, we recently published new AI Explorables on the topics of model confidence and unintended biases. In our latest Explorable, “From Confidently Incorrect Models to Humble Ensembles,” we discuss the problem with model confidence: models can sometimes be very confident in their predictions… and yet completely incorrect. Why does this happen and what can be done about it? Our Explorable walks through these issues with interactive examples and shows how we can build models that have more appropriate confidence in their predictions by using a technique called ensembling, which works by averaging the outputs of multiple models. Another Explorable, “Searching for Unintended Biases with Saliency”, shows how spurious correlations can lead to unintended biases — and how techniques such as saliency maps can detect some biases in datasets, with the caveat that it can be difficult to see bias when it’s more subtle and sporadic in a training set.

PAIR designs and publishes AI Explorables, interactive essays on timely topics and new methods in ML research, such as “From Confidently Incorrect Models to Humble Ensembles,” which looks at how and why models offer incorrect predictions with high confidence, and how “ensembling” the outputs of many models can help avoid this.

Transparency and the Data Cards Playbook

Continuing to advance our goal of helping people to understand ML, we promote transparent documentation. In the past, PAIR and Google Cloud developed model cards. Most recently, we presented our work on Data Cards at ACM FAccT’22 and open-sourced the Data Cards Playbook, a joint effort with the Technology, AI, Society, and Culture team (TASC). The Data Cards Playbook is a toolkit of participatory activities and frameworks to help teams and organizations overcome obstacles when setting up a transparency effort. It was created using an iterative, multidisciplinary approach rooted in the experiences of over 20 teams at Google, and comes with four modules: Ask, Inspect, Answer and Audit. These modules contain a variety of resources that can help you customize Data Cards to your organization’s needs:

  • 18 Foundations: Scalable frameworks that anyone can use on any dataset type
  • 19 Transparency Patterns: Evidence-based guidance to produce high-quality Data Cards at scale
  • 33 Participatory Activities: Cross-functional workshops to navigate transparency challenges for teams
  • Interactive Lab: Generate interactive Data Cards from markdown in the browser

The Data Cards Playbook is accessible as a learning pathway for startups, universities, and other research groups.


Software Tools

Our team thrives on creating tools, toolkits, libraries, and visualizations that expand access and improve understanding of ML models. One such resource is Know Your Data, which allows researchers to test a model’s performance for various scenarios through interactive qualitative exploration of datasets that they can use to find and fix unintended dataset biases.

Recently, PAIR released a new version of the Learning Interpretability Tool (LIT) for model debugging and understanding. LIT v0.5 provides support for image and tabular data, new interpreters for tabular feature attribution, a "Dive" visualization for faceted data exploration, and performance improvements that allow LIT to scale to 100k dataset entries. You can find the release notes and code on GitHub.

PAIR’s Learning Interpretability Tool (LIT), an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of ML models.

PAIR has also contributed to MakerSuite, a tool for rapid prototyping with LLMs using prompt programming. MakerSuite builds on our earlier research on PromptMaker, which won an honorable mention at CHI 2022. MakerSuite lowers the barrier to prototyping ML applications by broadening the types of people who can author these prototypes and by shortening the time spent prototyping models from months to minutes. 

A screenshot of MakerSuite, a tool for rapidly prototyping new ML models using prompt-based programming, which grew out of PAIR's prompt programming research.

Ongoing work

As the world of AI moves quickly ahead, PAIR is excited to continue to develop new tools, research, and educational materials to help change the way people think about what THEY can do with AI.

For example, we recently conducted an exploratory study with five designers (presented at CHI this year) that looks at how people with no ML programming experience or training can use prompt programming to quickly prototype functional user interface mock-ups. This prototyping speed can help inform designers on how to integrate ML models into products, and enables them to conduct user research sooner in the product design process.

Based on this study, PAIR’s researchers built PromptInfuser, a design tool plugin for authoring LLM-infused mock-ups. The plug-in introduces two novel LLM-interactions: input-output, which makes content interactive and dynamic, and frame-change, which directs users to different frames depending on their natural language input. The result is more tightly integrated UI and ML prototyping, all within a single interface.

Recent advances in AI represent a significant shift in how easy it is for researchers to customize and control models for their research objectives and goals.These capabilities are transforming the way we think about interacting with AI, and they create lots of new opportunities for the research community. PAIR is excited about how we can leverage these capabilities to make AI easier to use for more people.


Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone in PAIR, to Reena Jana and to all of our collaborators.

Source: Google AI Blog


Responsible AI at Google Research: Technology, AI, Society and Culture

Posted by Lauren Wilcox, Senior Staff Research Scientist, on behalf of the Technology, AI, Society, and Culture Team

Google sees AI as a foundational and transformational technology, with recent advances in generative AI technologies, such as LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen, Parti, MusicLM, and similar machine learning (ML) models, some of which are now being incorporated into our products. This transformative potential requires us to be responsible not only in how we advance our technology, but also in how we envision which technologies to build, and how we assess the social impact AI and ML-enabled technologies have on the world. This endeavor necessitates fundamental and applied research with an interdisciplinary lens that engages with — and accounts for — the social, cultural, economic, and other contextual dimensions that shape the development and deployment of AI systems. We must also understand the range of possible impacts that ongoing use of such technologies may have on vulnerable communities and broader social systems.

Our team, Technology, AI, Society, and Culture (TASC), is addressing this critical need. Research on the societal impacts of AI is complex and multi-faceted; no one disciplinary or methodological perspective can alone provide the diverse insights needed to grapple with the social and cultural implications of ML technologies. TASC thus leverages the strengths of an interdisciplinary team, with backgrounds ranging from computer science to social science, digital media and urban science. We use a multi-method approach with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods to critically examine and shape the social and technical processes that underpin and surround AI technologies. We focus on participatory, culturally-inclusive, and intersectional equity-oriented research that brings to the foreground impacted communities. Our work advances Responsible AI (RAI) in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, health, and general purpose ML models and applications. Below, we share examples of our approach to Responsible AI and where we are headed in 2023.

A visual diagram of the various social, technical, and equity-oriented research areas that TASC studies to progress Responsible AI in a way that respects the complex relationships between AI and society.

Theme 1: Culture, communities, & AI

One of our key areas of research is the advancement of methods to make generative AI technologies more inclusive of and valuable to people globally, through community-engaged, and culturally-inclusive approaches. Toward this aim, we see communities as experts in their context, recognizing their deep knowledge of how technologies can and should impact their own lives. Our research champions the importance of embedding cross-cultural considerations throughout the ML development pipeline. Community engagement enables us to shift how we incorporate knowledge of what’s most important throughout this pipeline, from dataset curation to evaluation. This also enables us to understand and account for the ways in which technologies fail and how specific communities might experience harm. Based on this understanding we have created responsible AI evaluation strategies that are effective in recognizing and mitigating biases along multiple dimensions.

Our work in this area is vital to ensuring that Google's technologies are safe for, work for, and are useful to a diverse set of stakeholders around the world. For example, our research on user attitudes towards AI, responsible interaction design, and fairness evaluations with a focus on the global south demonstrated the cross-cultural differences in the impact of AI and contributed resources that enable culturally-situated evaluations. We are also building cross-disciplinary research communities to examine the relationship between AI, culture, and society, through our recent and upcoming workshops on Cultures in AI/AI in Culture, Ethical Considerations in Creative Applications of Computer Vision, and Cross-Cultural Considerations in NLP.

Our recent research has also sought out perspectives of particular communities who are known to be less represented in ML development and applications. For example, we have investigated gender bias, both in natural language and in contexts such as gender-inclusive health, drawing on our research to develop more accurate evaluations of bias so that anyone developing these technologies can identify and mitigate harms for people with queer and non-binary identities.


Theme 2: Enabling Responsible AI throughout the development lifecycle

We work to enable RAI at scale, by establishing industry-wide best practices for RAI across the development pipeline, and ensuring our technologies verifiably incorporate that best practice by default. This applied research includes responsible data production and analysis for ML development, and systematically advancing tools and practices that support practitioners in meeting key RAI goals like transparency, fairness, and accountability. Extending earlier work on Data Cards, Model Cards and the Model Card Toolkit, we released the Data Cards Playbook, providing developers with methods and tools to document appropriate uses and essential facts related to a dataset. Because ML models are often trained and evaluated on human-annotated data, we also advance human-centric research on data annotation. We have developed frameworks to document annotation processes and methods to account for rater disagreement and rater diversity. These methods enable ML practitioners to better ensure diversity in annotation of datasets used to train models, by identifying current barriers and re-envisioning data work practices.


Future directions

We are now working to further broaden participation in ML model development, through approaches that embed a diversity of cultural contexts and voices into technology design, development, and impact assessment to ensure that AI achieves societal goals. We are also redefining responsible practices that can handle the scale at which ML technologies operate in today’s world. For example, we are developing frameworks and structures that can enable community engagement within industry AI research and development, including community-centered evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and dataset curation and sharing.

In particular, we are furthering our prior work on understanding how NLP language models may perpetuate bias against people with disabilities, extending this research to address other marginalized communities and cultures and including image, video, and other multimodal models. Such models may contain tropes and stereotypes about particular groups or may erase the experiences of specific individuals or communities. Our efforts to identify sources of bias within ML models will lead to better detection of these representational harms and will support the creation of more fair and inclusive systems.

TASC is about studying all the touchpoints between AI and people — from individuals and communities, to cultures and society. For AI to be culturally-inclusive, equitable, accessible, and reflective of the needs of impacted communities, we must take on these challenges with inter- and multidisciplinary research that centers the needs of impacted communities. Our research studies will continue to explore the interactions between society and AI, furthering the discovery of new ways to develop and evaluate AI in order for us to develop more robust and culturally-situated AI technologies.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone on the team that contributed to this blog post. In alphabetical order by last name: Cynthia Bennett, Eric Corbett, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Emily Denton, Sunipa Dev, Fernando Diaz, Mark Díaz, Shaun Kane, Shivani Kapania, Michael Madaio, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Rida Qadri, Renee Shelby, Ding Wang, and Andrew Zaldivar. Also, we would like to thank Toju Duke and Marian Croak for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

Source: Google AI Blog


Responsible AI at Google Research: The Impact Lab

Posted by Jamila Smith-Loud, Human Rights & Social Impact Research Lead, Google Research, Responsible AI and Human-Centered Technology Team

Globalized technology has the potential to create large-scale societal impact, and having a grounded research approach rooted in existing international human and civil rights standards is a critical component to assuring responsible and ethical AI development and deployment. The Impact Lab team, part of Google’s Responsible AI Team, employs a range of interdisciplinary methodologies to ensure critical and rich analysis of the potential implications of technology development. The team’s mission is to examine socioeconomic and human rights impacts of AI, publish foundational research, and incubate novel mitigations enabling machine learning (ML) practitioners to advance global equity. We study and develop scalable, rigorous, and evidence-based solutions using data analysis, human rights, and participatory frameworks.

The uniqueness of the Impact Lab’s goals is its multidisciplinary approach and the diversity of experience, including both applied and academic research. Our aim is to expand the epistemic lens of Responsible AI to center the voices of historically marginalized communities and to overcome the practice of ungrounded analysis of impacts by offering a research-based approach to understand how differing perspectives and experiences should impact the development of technology.


What we do

In response to the accelerating complexity of ML and the increased coupling between large-scale ML and people, our team critically examines traditional assumptions of how technology impacts society to deepen our understanding of this interplay. We collaborate with academic scholars in the areas of social science and philosophy of technology and publish foundational research focusing on how ML can be helpful and useful. We also offer research support to some of our organization’s most challenging efforts, including the 1,000 Languages Initiative and ongoing work in the testing and evaluation of language and generative models. Our work gives weight to Google's AI Principles.

To that end, we:

  • Conduct foundational and exploratory research towards the goal of creating scalable socio-technical solutions
  • Create datasets and research-based frameworks to evaluate ML systems
  • Define, identify, and assess negative societal impacts of AI
  • Create responsible solutions to data collection used to build large models
  • Develop novel methodologies and approaches that support responsible deployment of ML models and systems to ensure safety, fairness, robustness, and user accountability
  • Translate external community and expert feedback into empirical insights to better understand user needs and impacts
  • Seek equitable collaboration and strive for mutually beneficial partnerships

We strive not only to reimagine existing frameworks for assessing the adverse impact of AI to answer ambitious research questions, but also to promote the importance of this work.


Current research efforts


Understanding social problems

Our motivation for providing rigorous analytical tools and approaches is to ensure that social-technical impact and fairness is well understood in relation to cultural and historical nuances. This is quite important, as it helps develop the incentive and ability to better understand communities who experience the greatest burden and demonstrates the value of rigorous and focused analysis. Our goals are to proactively partner with external thought leaders in this problem space, reframe our existing mental models when assessing potential harms and impacts, and avoid relying on unfounded assumptions and stereotypes in ML technologies. We collaborate with researchers at Stanford, University of California Berkeley, University of Edinburgh, Mozilla Foundation, University of Michigan, Naval Postgraduate School, Data & Society, EPFL, Australian National University, and McGill University.

We examine systemic social issues and generate useful artifacts for responsible AI development.

Centering underrepresented voices

We also developed the Equitable AI Research Roundtable (EARR), a novel community-based research coalition created to establish ongoing partnerships with external nonprofit and research organization leaders who are equity experts in the fields of education, law, social justice, AI ethics, and economic development. These partnerships offer the opportunity to engage with multi-disciplinary experts on complex research questions related to how we center and understand equity using lessons from other domains. Our partners include PolicyLink; The Education Trust - West; Notley; Partnership on AI; Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley; The Michelson Institute for Intellectual Property, HBCU IP Futures Collaborative at Emory University; Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at the Banatao Institute; and the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The goals of the EARR program are to: (1) center knowledge about the experiences of historically marginalized or underrepresented groups, (2) qualitatively understand and identify potential approaches for studying social harms and their analogies within the context of technology, and (3) expand the lens of expertise and relevant knowledge as it relates to our work on responsible and safe approaches to AI development.

Through semi-structured workshops and discussions, EARR has provided critical perspectives and feedback on how to conceptualize equity and vulnerability as they relate to AI technology. We have partnered with EARR contributors on a range of topics from generative AI, algorithmic decision making, transparency, and explainability, with outputs ranging from adversarial queries to frameworks and case studies. Certainly the process of translating research insights across disciplines into technical solutions is not always easy but this research has been a rewarding partnership. We present our initial evaluation of this engagement in this paper.

EARR: Components of the ML development life cycle in which multidisciplinary knowledge is key for mitigating human biases.

Grounding in civil and human rights values

In partnership with our Civil and Human Rights Program, our research and analysis process is grounded in internationally recognized human rights frameworks and standards including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Utilizing civil and human rights frameworks as a starting point allows for a context-specific approach to research  that takes into account how a technology will be deployed and its community impacts. Most importantly, a rights-based approach to research enables us to prioritize conceptual and applied methods that emphasize the importance of understanding the most vulnerable users and the most salient harms to better inform day-to-day decision making, product design and long-term strategies.


Ongoing work


Social context to aid in dataset development and evaluation

We seek to employ an approach to dataset curation, model development and evaluation that is rooted in equity and that avoids expeditious but potentially risky approaches, such as utilizing incomplete data or not considering the historical and social cultural factors related to a dataset. Responsible data collection and analysis requires an additional level of careful consideration of the context in which the data are created. For example, one may see differences in outcomes across demographic variables that will be used to build models and should question the structural and system-level factors at play as some variables could ultimately be a reflection of historical, social and political factors. By using proxy data, such as race or ethnicity, gender, or zip code, we are systematically merging together the lived experiences of an entire group of diverse people and using it to train models that can recreate and maintain harmful and inaccurate character profiles of entire populations. Critical data analysis also requires a careful understanding that correlations or relationships between variables do not imply causation; the association we witness is often caused by additional multiple variables.


Relationship between social context and model outcomes

Building on this expanded and nuanced social understanding of data and dataset construction, we also approach the problem of anticipating or ameliorating the impact of ML models once they have been deployed for use in the real world. There are myriad ways in which the use of ML in various contexts — from education to health care — has exacerbated existing inequity because the developers and decision-making users of these systems lacked the relevant social understanding, historical context, and did not involve relevant stakeholders. This is a research challenge for the field of ML in general and one that is central to our team.


Globally responsible AI centering community experts

Our team also recognizes the saliency of understanding the socio-technical context globally. In line with Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, our team is engaging in research partnerships globally. For example, we are collaborating with The Natural Language Processing team and the Human Centered team in the Makerere Artificial Intelligence Lab in Uganda to research cultural and language nuances as they relate to language model development.


Conclusion

We continue to address the impacts of ML models deployed in the real world by conducting further socio-technical research and engaging external experts who are also part of the communities that are historically and globally disenfranchised. The Impact Lab is excited to offer an approach that contributes to the development of solutions for applied problems through the utilization of social-science, evaluation, and human rights epistemologies.


Acknowledgements

We would like to thank each member of the Impact Lab team — Jamila Smith-Loud, Andrew Smart, Jalon Hall, Darlene Neal, Amber Ebinama, and Qazi Mamunur Rashid — for all the hard work they do to ensure that ML is more responsible to its users and society across communities and around the world.

Source: Google AI Blog