Existing algorithms for ensuring fairness in AI use a single-shot training strategy, where an AI model is trained on an annotated training dataset with sensitive attributes and then fielded for utilization. This training strategy is effective in problems with stationary distributions, where both the training and testing data are drawn from the same distribution. However, it is vulnerable with respect to distributional shifts in the input space that may occur after the initial training phase. As a result, the time-dependent nature of data can introduce biases and performance degradation into the model predictions, even if the model is initially fair. Model retraining from scratch using a new annotated dataset is a naive solution that is expensive and time-consuming. We develop an algorithm to adapt a fair model to remain fair and generalizable under domain shift using solely new unannotated data points. We recast this learning setting as an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem. Our algorithm is based on updating the model such that the internal representation of data remains unbiased despite distributional shifts in the input space. We provide empirical validation on three common fairness datasets to show that the challenge exists in practical setting and to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

We develop an algorithm for adapting a semantic segmentation model that is trained using a labeled source domain to generalize well in an unlabeled target domain. A similar problem has been studied extensively in the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) literature, but existing UDA algorithms require access to both the source domain labeled data and the target domain unlabeled data for training a domain agnostic semantic segmentation model. Relaxing this constraint enables a user to adapt pretrained models to generalize in a target domain, without requiring access to source data. To this end, we learn a prototypical distribution for the source domain in an intermediate embedding space. This distribution encodes the abstract knowledge that is learned from the source domain. We then use this distribution for aligning the target domain distribution with the source domain distribution in the embedding space. We provide theoretical analysis and explain conditions under which our algorithm is effective. Experiments on benchmark adaptation tasks demonstrate our method achieves competitive performance even compared with joint UDA approaches.

In this paper, we consider optimizing submodular functions that are drawn from some unknown distribution. This setting arises, e.g., in recommender systems, where the utility of a subset of items may depend on a user-specific submodular utility function. In modern applications, the ground set of items is often so large that even the widely used (lazy) greedy algorithm is not efficient enough. As a remedy, we introduce the problem of sublinear time probabilistic submodular maximization: Given training examples of functions (e.g., via user feature vectors), we seek to reduce the ground set so that optimizing new functions drawn from the same distribution will provide almost as much value when restricted to the reduced ground set as when using the full set. We cast this problem as a two-stage submodular maximization and develop a novel efficient algorithm for this problem which offers $1/2(1 - 1/e^2)$ approximation ratio for general monotone submodular functions and general matroid constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several real-world applications where running the maximization problem on the reduced ground set leads to two orders of magnitude speed-up while incurring almost no loss.