arXiv:2412.09947cs.LG2024-12被引 6

无需敏感属性也能实现公平图神经网络,提升真实场景适用性。

Towards Fair Graph Neural Networks via Graph Counterfactual without Sensitive Attributes

  • 用伪敏感属性填补缺失数据,生成图反事实样本
  • 在6个真实数据集上同时提升模型公平性与性能表现
  • 适合隐私敏感或无法获取敏感信息的公平学习场景

图结构数据在当今互联世界中无处不在,推动了图分析领域的广泛研究。图神经网络(GNNs)在此领域表现出色,促使人们关注关键应用中的公平性问题。然而,现有公平GNN多基于统计公平性,面对统计异常时可能不足。受因果理论启发,利用图反事实缓解不公平根源成为新趋势。但现有反事实生成方法均需敏感属性,而现实中因隐私或法律限制常无法获取,制约了实际应用。本文提出Fairwos框架,通过生成伪敏感属性解决缺失问题,并设计从真实数据中寻找图反事实的策略。为训练公平GNN,提出使原始数据与反事实嵌入保持一致的方法,并动态调整各伪敏感属性权重以平衡公平性与实用性。理论上证明,最小化伪敏感属性与预测结果间关系可实现公平性。六组真实数据集实验表明,本方法在公平性与性能间取得更好平衡。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Graph-structured data is ubiquitous in today's connected world, driving extensive research in graph analysis. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great success in this field, leading to growing interest in developing fair GNNs for critical applications. However, most existing fair GNNs focus on statistical fairness notions, which may be insufficient when dealing with statistical anomalies. Hence, motivated by causal theory, there has been growing attention to mitigating root causes of unfairness utilizing graph counterfactuals. Unfortunately, existing methods for generating graph counterfactuals invariably require the sensitive attribute. Nevertheless, in many real-world applications, it is usually infeasible to obtain sensitive attributes due to privacy or legal issues, which challenge existing methods. In this paper, we propose a framework named Fairwos (improving Fairness without sensitive attributes). In particular, we first propose a mechanism to generate pseudo-sensitive attributes to remedy the problem of missing sensitive attributes, and then design a strategy for finding graph counterfactuals from the real dataset. To train fair GNNs, we propose a method to ensure that the embeddings from the original data are consistent with those from the graph counterfactuals, and dynamically adjust the weight of each pseudo-sensitive attribute to balance its contribution to fairness and utility. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate that minimizing the relation between these pseudo-sensitive attributes and the prediction can enable the fairness of GNNs. Experimental results on six real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in balancing utility and fairness.

图神经网络公平性反事实隐私保护

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