Algorithms increasingly govern societal functions, impacting multiple stakeholders and social groups. How can we design these algorithms to balance varying interests in a moral, legitimate way? As one answer to this question, we present WeBuildAI, a collective participatory framework that enables people to build algorithmic policy for their communities. The key idea of the framework is to enable stakeholders to construct a computational model that represents their views and to have those models vote on their behalf to create algorithmic policy. As a case study, we applied this framework to a matching algorithm that operates an on-demand food donation transportation service in order to adjudicate equity and efficiency trade-offs. The service's stakeholders--donors, volunteers, recipient organizations, and nonprofit employees--used the framework to design the algorithm through a series of studies in which we researched their experiences. Our findings suggest that the framework successfully enabled participants to build models that they felt confident represented their own beliefs. Participatory algorithm design also improved both procedural fairness and the distributive outcomes of the algorithm, raised participants' algorithmic awareness, and helped identify inconsistencies in human decision-making in the governing organization. Our work demonstrates the feasibility, potential and challenges of community involvement in algorithm design.
Autonomous cyber-physical agents play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that they behave in ways aligned with the values of society, we must develop techniques that allow these agents to not only maximize their reward in an environment, but also to learn and follow the implicit constraints of society. We detail a novel approach that uses inverse reinforcement learning to learn a set of unspecified constraints from demonstrations and reinforcement learning to learn to maximize environmental rewards. A contextual bandit-based orchestrator then picks between the two policies: constraint-based and environment reward-based. The contextual bandit orchestrator allows the agent to mix policies in novel ways, taking the best actions from either a reward-maximizing or constrained policy. In addition, the orchestrator is transparent on which policy is being employed at each time step. We test our algorithms using Pac-Man and show that the agent is able to learn to act optimally, act within the demonstrated constraints, and mix these two functions in complex ways.
We present a general approach to automating ethical decisions, drawing on machine learning and computational social choice. In a nutshell, we propose to learn a model of societal preferences, and, when faced with a specific ethical dilemma at runtime, efficiently aggregate those preferences to identify a desirable choice. We provide a concrete algorithm that instantiates our approach; some of its crucial steps are informed by a new theory of swap-dominance efficient voting rules. Finally, we implement and evaluate a system for ethical decision making in the autonomous vehicle domain, using preference data collected from 1.3 million people through the Moral Machine website.
It is common to see a handful of reviewers reject a highly novel paper, because they view, say, extensive experiments as far more important than novelty, whereas the community as a whole would have embraced the paper. More generally, the disparate mapping of criteria scores to final recommendations by different reviewers is a major source of inconsistency in peer review. In this paper we present a framework inspired by empirical risk minimization (ERM) for learning the community's aggregate mapping. The key challenge that arises is the specification of a loss function for ERM. We consider the class of L(p,q) loss functions, which is a matrix-extension of the standard class of Lp losses on vectors; here the choice of the loss function amounts to choosing the hyperparameters p and q. To deal with the absence of ground truth in our problem, we instead draw on computational social choice to identify desirable values of the hyperparameters p and q. Specifically, we characterize p=q=1 as the only choice of these hyperparameters that satisfies three natural axiomatic properties. Finally, we implement and apply our approach to reviews from IJCAI 2017.
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