arXiv:2504.14882cs.LGcs.CV2025-04NeurIPS

优化器选择会影响模型公平性,RMSProp比SGD更易收敛到公平解。

Some Optimizers are More Equal: Understanding the Role of Optimizers in Group Fairness

  • 通过随机微分方程分析优化动态,揭示优化器对公平性的影响机制。
  • 在极端不平衡下,RMSProp比SGD更可能收敛到公平极小值,且单步更新更公平。
  • 在多个数据集和任务上验证,自适应优化器在公平性上优于SGD,适合关注公平性的研究者。

我们研究优化算法的选择是否以及如何影响深度神经网络中的群体公平性。通过在可解析的设定中对优化动态进行随机微分方程分析,我们证明优化器的选择确实影响公平结果,尤其在严重不平衡情况下。进一步发现,在对比自适应方法与随机方法时,自适应类的RMSProp比随机类的SGD更有可能收敛到更公平的极小值。基于此洞察,我们推导出两个新的理论保证,表明在适当条件下,RMSProp相较于SGD在单步优化中具有更公平的参数更新并提升公平性。我们在三个公开数据集(CelebA、FairFace、MS-COCO)上进行了广泛实验,涵盖面部表情识别、性别分类和多标签分类等任务,使用多种骨干网络。考虑等机会、等偶遇和人口均等性等多种公平定义,自适应优化器如RMSProp和Adam在群体公平性上始终优于SGD,同时保持相近的预测准确率。结果凸显了自适应更新作为促进公平结果的关键但被忽视的机制。代码已开源:https://github.com/Mkolahdoozi/Some-Optimizers-Are-More-Equal。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We study whether and how the choice of optimization algorithm can impact group fairness in deep neural networks. Through stochastic differential equation analysis of optimization dynamics in an analytically tractable setup, we demonstrate that the choice of optimization algorithm indeed influences fairness outcomes, particularly under severe imbalance. Furthermore, we show that when comparing two categories of optimizers, adaptive methods and stochastic methods, RMSProp (from the adaptive category) has a higher likelihood of converging to fairer minima than SGD (from the stochastic category). Building on this insight, we derive two new theoretical guarantees showing that, under appropriate conditions, RMSProp exhibits fairer parameter updates and improved fairness in a single optimization step compared to SGD. We then validate these findings through extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, namely CelebA, FairFace, and MS-COCO, across different tasks as facial expression recognition, gender classification, and multi-label classification, using various backbones. Considering multiple fairness definitions including equalized odds, equal opportunity, and demographic parity, adaptive optimizers like RMSProp and Adam consistently outperform SGD in terms of group fairness, while maintaining comparable predictive accuracy. Our results highlight the role of adaptive updates as a crucial yet overlooked mechanism for promoting fair outcomes. We release the source code at: https://github.com/Mkolahdoozi/Some-Optimizers-Are-More-Equal.

优化器公平性机器学习

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