无先验性别信息下实现公平性,同时不牺牲模型性能。
Towards Harmless Rawlsian Fairness Regardless of Demographic Prior
- 通过最小化最优损失集内的训练损失方差,实现无需人口统计信息的公平训练。
- 在回归任务中显著提升公平性,分类任务因量化效用受限效果有限。
- 方法简单有效,适合关注隐私保护与公平性的机器学习研究者。
由于隐私与安全顾虑,当前群体公平性研究趋向于在不依赖人口统计信息的情况下进行模型训练。然而,多数方法仍需事先知晓人口特征。本文探索在无任何先验人口信息条件下实现公平性且不影响模型效用的可能性,称为“无害的罗尔斯公平性”。我们发现,在无先验信息时,此类公平性要求促使训练损失呈现狄拉克δ分布。为此,提出名为VFair的简单而有效的方法,旨在最小化最优经验损失集内的损失方差。该问题通过一种定制化的动态更新策略优化,同时作用于损失和梯度维度,引导模型趋向更公平的解,同时保持原有性能。实验表明,以往研究较少涉及的回归任务在应用VFair后可显著提升公平性,而分类任务通常无法受益,原因在于其量化效用测量机制。代码已公开于https://github.com/wxqpxw/VFair。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Due to privacy and security concerns, recent advancements in group fairness advocate for model training regardless of demographic information. However, most methods still require prior knowledge of demographics. In this study, we explore the potential for achieving fairness without compromising its utility when no prior demographics are provided to the training set, namely \emph{harmless Rawlsian fairness}. We ascertain that such a fairness requirement with no prior demographic information essential promotes training losses to exhibit a Dirac delta distribution. To this end, we propose a simple but effective method named VFair to minimize the variance of training losses inside the optimal set of empirical losses. This problem is then optimized by a tailored dynamic update approach that operates in both loss and gradient dimensions, directing the model towards relatively fairer solutions while preserving its intact utility. Our experimental findings indicate that regression tasks, which are relatively unexplored from literature, can achieve significant fairness improvement through VFair regardless of any prior, whereas classification tasks usually do not because of their quantized utility measurements. The implementation of our method is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/wxqpxw/VFair}.
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