EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Himabindu Lakkaraju
dblp:68/9376 · also Hima Lakkaraju
· DBLP profile ↗
13ranked-venue papers in the field
10as first author
5since 2021 · last 2024
0000-0001-7922-6544ORCID · corroborated
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 10 (7 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 3 (3 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | The First Workshop on AI Behavioral ScienceabstractThis workshop initiates a new study field which may be named AI behavioral science. It discusses recent findings, methodologies, applications, and potential societal impacts that are related to analyzing, understanding, and directing the behaviors of AI models, especially those built upon large language models. This half-day workshop includes several keynote and invited talks, a poster session, and a panel discussion. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Qiaozhu Mei, Chenhao Tan, Jie Tang 0001, Yutong Xie 0007 |
KDD | 1 |
| 2023 | Generative AI meets Responsible AI: Practical Challenges and OpportunitiesabstractGenerative AI models and applications are being rapidly developed and deployed across a wide spectrum of industries and applications ranging from writing and email assistants to graphic design and art generation to educational assistants to coding to drug discovery. However, there are several ethical and social considerations associated with generative AI models and applications. These concerns include lack of interpretability, bias and discrimination, privacy, lack of model robustness, fake and misleading content, copyright implications, plagiarism, and environmental impact associated with training and inference of generative AI models. Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Nazneen Fatema Rajani |
KDD | 2 |
| 2022 | A Human-Centric Perspective on Model MonitoringabstractPredictive models are increasingly used to make various consequential decisions in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, finance, and policy. It becomes critical to ensure that these models make accurate predictions, are robust to shifts in the data, do not rely on spurious features, and do not unduly discriminate against minority groups. To this end, several approaches spanning various areas such as explainability, fairness, and robustness have been proposed in recent literature. Such approaches need to be human-centered as they cater to the understanding of the models to their users. However, there is little to no research on understanding the needs and challenges in monitoring deployed machine learning (ML) models from a human-centric perspective. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 practitioners who are experienced with deploying ML models and engaging with customers spanning domains such as financial services, healthcare, hiring, online retail, computational advertising, and conversational assistants. We identified various human-centric challenges and requirements for model monitoring in real-world applications. Specifically, we found that relevant stakeholders would want model monitoring systems to provide clear, unambiguous, and easy-to-understand insights that are readily actionable. Furthermore, our study also revealed that stakeholders desire customization of model monitoring systems to cater to domain-specific use cases. Murtuza N. Shergadwala, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Krishnaram Kenthapadi |
HCOMP | 2 |
| 2022 | Model Monitoring in Practice: Lessons Learned and Open ChallengesabstractArtificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly playing an integral role in determining our day-to-day experiences. Increasingly, the applications of AI are no longer limited to search and recommendation systems, such as web search and movie and product recommendations, but AI is also being used in decisions and processes that are critical for individuals, businesses, and society. With AI based solutions in high-stakes domains such as hiring, lending, criminal justice, healthcare, and education, the resulting personal and professional implications of AI are far-reaching. Consequently, it becomes critical to ensure that these models are making accurate predictions, are robust to shifts in the data, are not relying on spurious features, and are not unduly discriminating against minority groups. To this end, several approaches spanning various areas such as explainability, fairness, and robustness have been proposed in recent literature, and many papers and tutorials on these topics have been presented in recent computer science conferences. However, there is relatively less attention on the need for monitoring machine learning (ML) models once they are deployed and the associated research challenges. Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Pradeep Natarajan, Mehrnoosh Sameki |
KDD | 2 |
| 2021 | Towards Reliable and Practicable Algorithmic RecourseabstractAs predictive models are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes decision making (e.g., loan approvals), there has been growing interest in developing post hoc techniques which provide recourse to individuals who have been adversely impacted by predicted outcomes. For example, when an individual is denied loan by a predictive model deployed by a bank, they should be informed about reasons for this decision and what can be done to reverse it. While several approaches have been proposed to tackle the problem of generating recourses, these techniques rely heavily on various restrictive assumptions. For instance, these techniques generate recourses under the assumption that the underlying predictive models do not change. In practice, however, models are often updated for a variety of reasons including data distribution shifts. There is little to no research that systematically investigates and addresses these limitations. Himabindu Lakkaraju |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2017 | The Selective Labels Problem: Evaluating Algorithmic Predictions in the Presence of UnobservablesabstractEvaluating whether machines improve on human performance is one of the central questions of machine learning. However, there are many domains where the data is selectively labeled, in the sense that the observed outcomes are themselves a consequence of the existing choices of the human decision-makers. For instance, in the context of judicial bail decisions, we observe the outcome of whether a defendant fails to return for their court appearance only if the human judge decides to release the defendant on bail. This selective labeling makes it harder to evaluate predictive models as the instances for which outcomes are observed do not represent a random sample of the population. Here we propose a novel framework for evaluating the performance of predictive models on selectively labeled data. We develop an approach called contraction which allows us to compare the performance of predictive models and human decision-makers without resorting to counterfactual inference. Our methodology harnesses the heterogeneity of human decision-makers and facilitates effective evaluation of predictive models even in the presence of unmeasured confounders (unobservables) which influence both human decisions and the resulting outcomes. Experimental results on real world datasets spanning diverse domains such as health care, insurance, and criminal justice demonstrate the utility of our evaluation metric in comparing human decisions and machine predictions. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jon M. Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan |
KDD | 1 |
| 2016 | Interpretable Decision Sets: A Joint Framework for Description and PredictionabstractOne of the most important obstacles to deploying predictive models is the fact that humans do not understand and trust them. Knowing which variables are important in a model's prediction and how they are combined can be very powerful in helping people understand and trust automatic decision making systems. Here we propose interpretable decision sets, a framework for building predictive models that are highly accurate, yet also highly interpretable. Decision sets are sets of independent if-then rules. Because each rule can be applied independently, decision sets are simple, concise, and easily interpretable. We formalize decision set learning through an objective function that simultaneously optimizes accuracy and interpretability of the rules. In particular, our approach learns short, accurate, and non-overlapping rules that cover the whole feature space and pay attention to small but important classes. Moreover, we prove that our objective is a non-monotone submodular function, which we efficiently optimize to find a near-optimal set of rules. Experiments show that interpretable decision sets are as accurate at classification as state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. They are also three times smaller on average than rule-based models learned by other methods. Finally, results of a user study show that people are able to answer multiple-choice questions about the decision boundaries of interpretable decision sets and write descriptions of classes based on them faster and more accurately than with other rule-based models that were designed for interpretability. Overall, our framework provides a new approach to interpretable machine learning that balances accuracy, interpretability, and computational efficiency. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Stephen H. Bach, Jure Leskovec |
KDD | 1 |
| 2015 | A Machine Learning Framework to Identify Students at Risk of Adverse Academic OutcomesabstractMany school districts have developed successful intervention programs to help students graduate high school on time. However, identifying and prioritizing students who need those interventions the most remains challenging. This paper describes a machine learning framework to identify such students, discusses features that are useful for this task, applies several classification algorithms, and evaluates them using metrics important to school administrators. To help test this framework and make it practically useful, we partnered with two U.S. school districts with a combined enrollment of approximately 200,000 students. We together designed several evaluation metrics to assess the goodness of machine learning algorithms from an educator's perspective. This paper focuses on students at risk of not finishing high school on time, but our framework lays a strong foundation for future work on other adverse academic outcomes. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Everaldo Aguiar, Carl Shan, Nasir Bhanpuri, Rayid Ghani, Kecia L. Addison |
KDD | 1 |
| 2015 | A Bayesian Framework for Modeling Human EvaluationsabstractSeveral situations that we come across in our daily lives involve some form of evaluation: a process where an evaluator chooses a correct label for a given item. Examples of such situations include a crowd-worker labeling an image or a student answering a multiple-choice question. Gaining insights into human evaluations is important for determining the quality of individual evaluators as well as identifying true labels of items. Here, we generalize the question of estimating the quality of individual evaluators, extending it to obtain diagnostic insights into how various evaluators label different kinds of items. We propose a series of increasingly powerful hierarchical Bayesian models which infer latent groups of evaluators and items with the goal of obtaining insights into the underlying evaluation process. We apply our framework to a wide range of real-world domains, and demonstrate that our approach can accurately predict evaluator decisions, diagnose types of mistakes evaluators tend to make, and infer true labels of items. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jon M. Kleinberg, Sendhil Mullainathan |
SDM | 1 |
| 2013 | What's in a Name? Understanding the Interplay between Titles, Content, and Communities in Social Media
Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julian J. McAuley, Jure Leskovec |
ICWSM | 1 |
| 2012 | Dynamic Multi-relational Chinese Restaurant Process for Analyzing Influences on Users in Social MediaabstractWe study the problem of analyzing influence of various factors affecting individual messages posted in social media. The problem is challenging because of various types of influences propagating through the social media network that act simultaneously on any user. Additionally, the topic composition of the influencing factors and the susceptibility of users to these influences evolve over time. This problem has not been studied before, and off-the-shelf models are unsuitable for this purpose. To capture the complex interplay of these various factors, we propose a new non-parametric model called the Dynamic Multi-Relational Chinese Restaurant Process. This accounts for the user network for data generation and also allows the parameters to evolve over time. Designing inference algorithms for this model suited for large scale social-media data is another challenge. To this end, we propose a scalable and multi-threaded inference algorithm based on online Gibbs Sampling. Extensive evaluations on large-scale Twitter and Face book data show that the extracted topics when applied to authorship and commenting prediction outperform state-of-the-art baselines. More importantly, our model produces valuable insights on topic trends and user personality trends beyond the capability of existing approaches. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Indrajit Bhattacharya, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya |
ICDM | 1 |
| 2011 | Attention prediction on social media brand pagesabstractIn this paper, we deal with the problem of predicting how much attention a newly submitted post would receive from fellow community members of closed communities in social networking sites. Though the concept of attention is subjective, the number of comments received by a post serves as a very good indicator of the same. Unlike previous work which primarily made use of either content features or the network features (friendship links on the network), we exploit both the content features and community level features (for instance, what time of the day is the community more active) for tackling this problem. Further, we focus on dedicated pages of corporate brands on social media websites and accordingly extract important features from the content and community activity of such brand pages. The attention prediction task finds direct application in the listening, monitoring and engaging activities of the businesses that have such brand-pages. In this paper, we formulate the problem of attention prediction on social media brand pages. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jitendra Ajmera |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2011 | Exploiting Coherence for the Simultaneous Discovery of Latent Facets and associated SentimentsabstractFacet-based sentiment analysis involves discovering the latent facets, sentiments and their associations. Traditional facet-based sentiment analysis algorithms typically perform the various tasks in sequence, and fail to take advantage of the mutual reinforcement of the tasks. Additionally, inferring sentiment levels typically requires domain knowledge or human intervention. In this paper, we propose a series of probabilistic models that jointly discover latent facets and sentiment topics, and also order the sentiment topics with respect to a multi-point scale, in a language and domain independent manner. This is achieved by simultaneously capturing both short-range syntactic structure and long range semantic dependencies between the sentiment and facet words. The models further incorporate coherence in reviews, where reviewers dwell on one facet or sentiment level before moving on, for more accurate facet and sentiment discovery. For reviews which are supplemented with ratings, our models automatically order the latent sentiment topics, without requiring seed-words or domain-knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to combine the notions of syntactic and semantic dependencies in the domain of review mining. Further, the concept of facet and sentiment coherence has not been explored earlier either. Extensive experimental results on real world review data show that the proposed models outperform various state of the art baselines for facet-based sentiment analysis. Himabindu Lakkaraju, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Indrajit Bhattacharya, Srujana Merugu |
SDM | 1 |