arXiv:2504.17066cs.LGcs.CY2025-04

用倾向得分匹配修复模型公平性漏洞,提升评估与纠正偏差的准确性。

Whence Is A Model Fair? Fixing Fairness Bugs via Propensity Score Matching

  • 通过倾向得分匹配识别测试集中相似样本对,定位无偏子集。
  • 在未匹配样本上用公平性损失函数进行概率校准,显著降低剩余偏差。
  • 无需牺牲预测性能,适合需严谨公平性验证的落地场景。

公平性感知学习旨在减少对特定受保护群体(如性别、族裔、年龄)的歧视,同时最小化预测性能损失。尽管已有诸多努力,先前研究显示许多模型在多种公平性度量下仍存在不公平。本文探讨训练与测试数据采样方式是否影响公平性度量的可靠性。由于训练集与测试集常从同一总体随机采样,训练数据中的偏差可能残留在测试集中,从而扭曲公平性评估。为此,我们提出 FairMatch,一种后处理方法,采用倾向得分匹配来评估并缓解偏差。FairMatch 在测试集中识别具有相似倾向得分的对照组与处理组配对,并据此调整不同子群的决策阈值;对于无法匹配的样本,则使用公平性感知损失函数进行概率校准。实验表明,该方法能 (a) 精确识别测试集中模型无偏的部分,(b) 显著降低其余部分的偏差。整体而言,倾向得分匹配为公平性评估与缓解提供了一种合理且不损害预测性能的途径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fairness-aware learning aims to mitigate discrimination against specific protected social groups (e.g., those categorized by gender, ethnicity, age) while minimizing predictive performance loss. Despite efforts to improve fairness in machine learning, prior studies have shown that many models remain unfair when measured against various fairness metrics. In this paper, we examine whether the way training and testing data are sampled affects the reliability of reported fairness metrics. Since training and test sets are often randomly sampled from the same population, bias present in the training data may still exist in the test data, potentially skewing fairness assessments. To address this, we propose FairMatch, a post-processing method that applies propensity score matching to evaluate and mitigate bias. FairMatch identifies control and treatment pairs with similar propensity scores in the test set and adjusts decision thresholds for different subgroups accordingly. For samples that cannot be matched, we perform probabilistic calibration using fairness-aware loss functions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can (a) precisely locate subsets of the test data where the model is unbiased, and (b) significantly reduce bias on the remaining data. Overall, propensity score matching offers a principled way to improve both fairness evaluation and mitigation, without sacrificing predictive performance.

公平性倾向得分后处理偏差修正

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。