不依赖敏感信息也能提升最弱势群体公平性,通过内在重要性重加权。
Alpha and Prejudice: Improving $α$-sized Worst-case Fairness via Intrinsic Reweighting
- 基于样本对公平性的内在贡献度进行重加权,无需依赖敏感属性。
- 在多个公平性基准上优于现有方法,最差群体性能提升显著。
- 适合关注隐私保护与公平性平衡的研究者和实践者。
现有时序公平性方法通过最大化最弱势群体的模型效用实现群体平等,但需依赖敏感属性,实际应用受限。本文提出以最小分组比例下界α作为辅助信息的‘α-规模最坏情况公平性’框架,从数据隐私角度论证其合理性。我们不依赖特定损失函数,提出基于样本内在公平性重要性的重加权策略;针对最坏情况目标的全局特性,设计了随机学习方案以简化训练过程。此外,针对异常值问题,提出鲁棒变体。理论分析与实验表明,所提方法与现有‘公平性重加权’研究存在关联,在多个公平性基准上表现更优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Worst-case fairness with off-the-shelf demographics achieves group parity by maximizing the model utility of the worst-off group. Nevertheless, demographic information is often unavailable in practical scenarios, which impedes the use of such a direct max-min formulation. Recent advances have reframed this learning problem by introducing the lower bound of minimal partition ratio, denoted as $α$, as side information, referred to as ``$α$-sized worst-case fairness'' in this paper. We first justify the practical significance of this setting by presenting noteworthy evidence from the data privacy perspective, which has been overlooked by existing research. Without imposing specific requirements on loss functions, we propose reweighting the training samples based on their intrinsic importance to fairness. Given the global nature of the worst-case formulation, we further develop a stochastic learning scheme to simplify the training process without compromising model performance. Additionally, we address the issue of outliers and provide a robust variant to handle potential outliers during model training. Our theoretical analysis and experimental observations reveal the connections between the proposed approaches and existing ``fairness-through-reweighting'' studies, with extensive experimental results on fairness benchmarks demonstrating the superiority of our methods.
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