arXiv:2501.14551cs.LG2025-01被引 3

简单集成模型能提升弱势群体表现,且不牺牲整体性能。

Fairness of Deep Ensembles: On the interplay between per-group task difficulty and under-representation

  • 用同质集成提升不同群体的预测公平性。
  • 在群体任务难度不同时,平衡数据反而降低整体与公平性。
  • 适合关注算法公平性的研究者与实践者。

集成方法常被视作提升机器学习模型泛化性能和预测鲁棒性的有效手段。针对算法公平性,异质集成(由多种模型类型组成)已被用于缓解性别、年龄或种族等人口属性带来的偏差。此外,近期研究发现,在多分类问题中,即使是简单的同质集成也可能偏向于表现最差的目标类别。尽管同质集成更易实施,但其对按人口属性划分的子群体是否同样有益尚不明确。本文表明,这种简单方法确实能缓解群体间差异,尤其有利于表现较弱的子群体。有趣的是,这无需牺牲整体性能——而这是以往偏差缓解策略中的常见权衡。我们进一步分析了导致偏差的两个因素:子群体代表性不足与各群体任务固有难度之间的相互作用。结果表明,与普遍假设相反,若各群体任务难度不同,完全平衡的数据集可能反而损害整体性能和群体间差距。这凸显了在公平性问题中需综合考虑多重因素交互的重要性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Ensembling is commonly regarded as an effective way to improve the general performance of models in machine learning, while also increasing the robustness of predictions. When it comes to algorithmic fairness, heterogeneous ensembles, composed of multiple model types, have been employed to mitigate biases in terms of demographic attributes such as sex, age or ethnicity. Moreover, recent work has shown how in multi-class problems even simple homogeneous ensembles may favor performance of the worst-performing target classes. While homogeneous ensembles are simpler to implement in practice, it is not yet clear whether their benefits translate to groups defined not in terms of their target class, but in terms of demographic or protected attributes, hence improving fairness. In this work we show how this simple and straightforward method is indeed able to mitigate disparities, particularly benefiting under-performing subgroups. Interestingly, this can be achieved without sacrificing overall performance, which is a common trade-off observed in bias mitigation strategies. Moreover, we analyzed the interplay between two factors which may result in biases: sub-group under-representation and the inherent difficulty of the task for each group. These results revealed that, contrary to popular assumptions, having balanced datasets may be suboptimal if the task difficulty varies between subgroups. Indeed, we found that a perfectly balanced dataset may hurt both the overall performance and the gap between groups. This highlights the importance of considering the interaction between multiple forces at play in fairness.

算法公平集成学习偏差缓解

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