从因果视角构建推荐系统审计框架,评估用户影响力与系统稳定性。
A Unified Causal Framework for Auditing Recommender Systems for Ethical Concerns
- 基于因果框架定义可计算的审计指标
- 提出未来/过往可达性与稳定性两类新指标
- 支持白盒与黑盒两种方式计算,适合算法审查者
随着推荐系统在各领域的广泛应用,它们日益影响用户信念与偏好。审计推荐系统至关重要,不仅有助于持续优化算法,还能防范偏见与伦理问题。本文从因果视角出发,提出一个通用的审计指标定义框架。在此框架下,我们分类梳理现有指标并识别其不足——尤其缺乏在多步推荐动态中衡量用户自主性的指标。为此,我们提出两类新指标:未来可达性与过去可达性,分别衡量用户对自己及他人推荐结果的影响能力;以及稳定性指标。我们提供基于梯度和黑盒两种计算方法,使审计者可在不同系统访问权限下使用。实验验证了方法的有效性,并通过新指标揭示了推荐系统设计中的潜在问题。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As recommender systems become widely deployed in different domains, they increasingly influence their users' beliefs and preferences. Auditing recommender systems is crucial as it not only ensures the continuous improvement of recommendation algorithms but also safeguards against potential issues like biases and ethical concerns. In this paper, we view recommender system auditing from a causal lens and provide a general recipe for defining auditing metrics. Under this general causal auditing framework, we categorize existing auditing metrics and identify gaps in them -- notably, the lack of metrics for auditing user agency while accounting for the multi-step dynamics of the recommendation process. We leverage our framework and propose two classes of such metrics:future- and past-reacheability and stability, that measure the ability of a user to influence their own and other users' recommendations, respectively. We provide both a gradient-based and a black-box approach for computing these metrics, allowing the auditor to compute them under different levels of access to the recommender system. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of methods for computing the proposed metrics and inspect the design of recommender systems through these proposed metrics.
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