Conditional demographic parity (CDP) is a measure of the demographic parity of a predictive model or decision process when conditioning on an additional feature or set of features. Many algorithmic fairness techniques exist to target demographic parity, but CDP is much harder to achieve, particularly when the conditioning variable has many levels and/or when the model outputs are continuous. The problem of auditing and enforcing CDP is understudied in the literature. In light of this, we propose novel measures of conditional demographic disparity (CDD) which rely on statistical distances borrowed from the optimal transport literature. We further design and evaluate regularization-based approaches based on these CDD measures. Our methods, FairBiT and FairLeap, allow us to target conditional demographic parity even when the conditioning variable has many levels. When model outputs are continuous, our methods target full equality of the conditional distributions, unlike other methods that only consider first moments or related proxy quantities. We validate our approaches on real-world datasets.

Xinyu Zhang, Linmei Hu, Luhao Zhang, Wentao Cheng, Yashen Wang, Ge Shi, Chong Feng, Liqiang Nie. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Counterfactual data augmentation, which generates minimally edited tokens to alter labels, has become a key approach to improving model robustness in natural language processing.It is usually implemented by first identifying the causal terms and then modifying these terms to create counterfactual candidates.The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has effectively facilitated the task of counterfactual data augmentation.However, existing LLMbased approaches still face some challenges in 1) accurately extracting the task-specific causal terms, and 2) the quality of LLM-generated counterfacts.To address the issues, we propose a dually self-improved counterfactual data augmentation method using LLM.On the one hand, we design a self-improved strategy employing the attention distribution of the task model to identify the task-specific causal terms, which is lightweight and task-specific.On the other hand, a second self-improved strategy based on direct preference optimization is utilized to refine LLM-generated counterfacts, achieving high-quality counterfacts.Finally, a balanced loss preventing over-emphasis on augmentated data is proposed to retrain the task model on the fusion of existing data and generated counterfacts.Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in generating high-quality counterfacts for improving task performance.

Currently, lightweight hybrid backbone networks have partially alleviated the issue of computational saturation, but the imbalance in computational efficiencys between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and attention mechanisms is becoming increasingly apparent. Specifically, although linear attention mechanisms and their variants have made progress in lightweight design, they still fail to meet the demands of hybrid models for long-sequence modeling. On the other hand, existing lightweight SoftMax attention computations typically reduce the feature map to a fixed size to decrease the number of sequences, thereby compressing the computational scale. However, the process of determining the feature map reduction ratio is cumbersome, and computational saturation issues still persist. To address this issue, this paper proposes a lightweight SoftMax attention mechanism with adaptive feature map sizes, named Fast Window Attention (FWA), which generates a small number of key sequences (Key and Value) through window aggregation for attention computation. Additionally, it explains the rationality of using ReLU to simulate SoftMax operations in lightweight global attention mechanisms. Finally, the paper designs a global-local feature fusion mechanism and combines it with GhostNet to propose a lightweight hybrid backbone network, LOLViT. Through visual tasks such as classification (ImageNet 1K), detection (COCO 2017), and segmentation (BDD100K), along with extensive ablation studies, it is demonstrated that LOLViT outperforms CNN models of the same level in both inference speed and model accuracy. Notably, the inference speed of LOLViT-X is 5× that of MobileViT-X.

In recent years, Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have gained increasing attention due to their excellent performance in applications. However, the lack of high-quality benchmarks in new fields has become a critical limitation for developing and applying HGNNs. To accommodate the urgent need for emerging fields and the advancement of HGNNs, we present two large-scale, real-world, and challenging heterogeneous graph datasets from real scenarios: risk commodity detection and takeout recommendation. Meanwhile, we establish standard benchmark interfaces that provide over 40 heterogeneous graph datasets. We provide initial data split, unified evaluation metrics, and baseline results for future work, making it fair and handy to explore state-of-the-art HGNNs. Our interfaces also offer a comprehensive toolkit to research the characteristics of graph datasets. The above new datasets are publicly available on https://zenodo.org/communities/hgd, and the interface codes are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/hgbi.

With the rapid growth of interaction data, many clustering methods have been proposed to discover interaction patterns as prior knowledge beneficial to downstream tasks. Considering that an interaction can be seen as an action occurring among multiple objects, most existing methods model the objects and their pair-wise relations as nodes and links in graphs. However, they only model and leverage part of the information in real entire interactions, i.e., either decompose the entire interaction into several pair-wise sub-interactions for simplification, or only focus on clustering some specific types of objects, which limits the performance and explainability of clustering. To tackle this issue, we propose to Co-cluster the Interactions via Attentive Hypergraph neural network (CIAH). Particularly, with more comprehensive modeling of interactions by hypergraph, we propose an attentive hypergraph neural network to encode the entire interactions, where an attention mechanism is utilized to select important attributes for explanations. Then, we introduce a salient method to guide the attention to be more consistent with real importance of attributes, namely saliency-based consistency. Moreover, we propose a novel co-clustering method to perform a joint clustering for the representations of interactions and the corresponding distributions of attribute selection, namely cluster-based consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CIAH significantly outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods on both public datasets and real industrial datasets.

Linmei Hu, Tianchi Yang, Luhao Zhang, Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang, Chuan Shi, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Heterogeneous graphs (HGs), consisting of multiple types of nodes and links, can characterize a variety of real-world complex systems. Recently, heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs), as a powerful graph embedding method to aggregate heterogeneous structure and attribute information, has earned a lot of attention. Despite the ability of HGNNs in capturing rich semantics which reveal different aspects of nodes, they still stay at a coarse-grained level which simply exploits structural characteristics. In fact, rich unstructured text content of nodes also carries latent but more fine-grained semantics arising from multi-facet topic-aware factors, which fundamentally manifest why nodes of different types would connect and form a specific heterogeneous structure. However, little effort has been devoted to factorizing them.

Linmei Hu, Luhao Zhang, Chuan Shi, Liqiang Nie, Weili Guan, Cheng Yang. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Intrinsically disordered proteins/regions (IDPs/IDRs) are prevalent in allosteric regulation. It was previously thought that intrinsic disorder is favorable for maximizing the allosteric coupling. Here, we propose a comprehensive ensemble model to compare the roles of both order-order transition and disorder-order transition in allosteric effect. It is revealed that the MWC pathway (order-order transition) has a higher probability than the EAM pathway (disorder-order transition) in allostery, suggesting a complicated role of IDPs/IDRs in regulatory proteins. In addition, an analytic formula for the maximal allosteric coupling response is obtained, which shows that too stable or too unstable state is unfavorable to endow allostery, and is thus helpful for rational design of allosteric drugs.