We investigate the prominent class of fair representation learning methods for bias mitigation. Using causal reasoning to define and formalise different sources of dataset bias, we reveal important implicit assumptions inherent to these methods. We prove fundamental limitations on fair representation learning when evaluation data is drawn from the same distribution as training data and run experiments across a range of medical modalities to examine the performance of fair representation learning under distribution shifts. Our results explain apparent contradictions in the existing literature and reveal how rarely considered causal and statistical aspects of the underlying data affect the validity of fair representation learning. We raise doubts about current evaluation practices and the applicability of fair representation learning methods in performance-sensitive settings. We argue that fine-grained analysis of dataset biases should play a key role in the field moving forward.

Despite the constant development of new bias mitigation methods for machine learning, no method consistently succeeds, and a fundamental question remains unanswered: when and why do bias mitigation techniques fail? In this paper, we hypothesise that a key factor may be the often-overlooked but crucial step shared by many bias mitigation methods: the definition of subgroups. To investigate this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art bias mitigation methods across multiple vision and language classification tasks, systematically varying subgroup definitions, including coarse, fine-grained, intersectional, and noisy subgroups. Our findings reveal that subgroup choice significantly impacts performance, with certain groupings paradoxically leading to worse outcomes than no mitigation at all. They suggest that observing a disparity between a set of subgroups is not a sufficient reason to use those subgroups for mitigation. Through theoretical analysis, we explain these phenomena and uncover a counter-intuitive insight that, in some cases, improving fairness with respect to a particular set of subgroups is best achieved by using a different set of subgroups for mitigation. Our work highlights the importance of careful subgroup definition in bias mitigation and presents it as an alternative lever for improving the robustness and fairness of machine learning models.

Despite significant advancements in deep learning for vision and natural language, unsupervised domain adaptation in audio remains relatively unexplored. We, in part, attribute this to the lack of an appropriate benchmark dataset. To address this gap, we present Synthia’s melody, a novel audio data generation framework capable of simulating an infinite variety of 4-second melodies with user-specified confounding structures characterised by musical keys, timbre, and loudness. Unlike existing datasets collected under observational settings, Synthia’s melody is free of unobserved biases, ensuring the reproducibility and comparability of experiments. To showcase its utility, we generate two types of distribution shifts—domain shift and sample selection bias—and evaluate the performance of acoustic deep learning models under these shifts. Our evaluations reveal that Synthia’s melody provides a robust testbed for examining the susceptibility of these models to varying levels of distribution shift.

Adapting the cloud for high-performance computing (HPC) is a challenging task, as software for HPC applications hinges on fast network connections and is sensitive to hardware failures. Using cloud infrastructure to recreate conventional HPC clusters is therefore in many cases an infeasible solution for migrating HPC applications to the cloud. As an alternative to the generic lift and shift approach, we consider the specific application of seismic imaging and demonstrate a serverless and event-driven approach for running large-scale instances of this problem in the cloud. Instead of permanently running compute instances, our workflow is based on a serverless architecture with high throughput batch computing and event-driven computations, in which computational resources are only running as long as they are utilized. We demonstrate that this approach is very flexible and allows for resilient and nested levels of parallelization, including domain decomposition for solving the underlying partial differential equations. While the event-driven approach introduces some overhead as computational resources are repeatedly restarted, it inherently provides resilience to instance shut-downs and allows a significant reduction of cost by avoiding idle instances, thus making the cloud a viable alternative to on-premise clusters for large-scale seismic imaging.