用特征函数距离实现公平分类,稳定高效且不降精度。
Simple and Effective Specialized Representations for Fair Classifiers
- 基于特征函数距离构建敏感信息最小化的表示
- 在多个基准数据集上公平性与准确率均优于或持平现有方法
- 方法简单易用,适合实际部署的公平决策系统
公平分类因国际法规和高风险决策场景的应用而日益重要。现有方法多依赖对抗学习或敏感群体间分布匹配,但前者不稳定,后者计算开销大。本文提出一种基于特征函数距离的新方法,使学习到的表示包含最少敏感信息,同时保持下游任务高有效性。通过特征函数,相比传统方法更具稳定性与效率。此外,我们引入目标函数的简单松弛,确保常见分类模型的公平性,且性能无损失。在多个基准数据集上的实验表明,本方法始终达到或超越现有方法的公平性与预测准确率,兼具鲁棒性与计算高效性,是真实应用的可行方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Fair classification is a critical challenge that has gained increasing importance due to international regulations and its growing use in high-stakes decision-making settings. Existing methods often rely on adversarial learning or distribution matching across sensitive groups; however, adversarial learning can be unstable, and distribution matching can be computationally intensive. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach based on the characteristic function distance. Our method ensures that the learned representation contains minimal sensitive information while maintaining high effectiveness for downstream tasks. By utilizing characteristic functions, we achieve a more stable and efficient solution compared to traditional methods. Additionally, we introduce a simple relaxation of the objective function that guarantees fairness in common classification models with no performance degradation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently matches or achieves better fairness and predictive accuracy than existing methods. Moreover, our method maintains robustness and computational efficiency, making it a practical solution for real-world applications.
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