arXiv:2505.15788cs.LGmath.OC2025-05

用硬约束优化公平性,避免调参难题,可同时控制多种不公平指标。

Fair Supervised Learning Through Constraints on Smooth Nonconvex Unfairness-Measure Surrogates

  • 用平滑非凸代理函数替代不连续的不公平度量
  • 通过硬约束实现多维度公平性控制,无需复杂正则化
  • 模型求解更高效,适配需要严格公平保障的应用

本文提出一种新的公平监督学习策略。与现有方法相比,主要优势包括:(a) 引入一种基于优化文献中光滑化方法的新平滑非凸代理函数,用于逼近不连续不公平度量中的Heaviside函数;该代理函数为紧逼近,确保训练出的模型具有公平性,而其他(如凸)代理函数在实践中可能无法保证公平性。(b) 不依赖需调参的正则化项及对应的复杂优化问题,改用硬约束方式,可直接施加对不公平性的容忍度限制,避免正则化带来的计算与调参负担。(c) 可同时对多个(可能冲突的)不公平度量施加约束;虽然正则化也能处理多目标,但会加剧优化难度并增加调参成本。相比之下,本方法通过硬约束构建可高效求解的优化模型,且所需调参极少。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A new strategy for fair supervised machine learning is proposed. The main advantages of the proposed strategy as compared to others in the literature are as follows. (a) We introduce a new smooth nonconvex surrogate to approximate the Heaviside functions involved in discontinuous unfairness measures. The surrogate is based on smoothing methods from the optimization literature, and is new for the fair supervised learning literature. The surrogate is a tight approximation which ensures the trained prediction models are fair, as opposed to other (e.g., convex) surrogates that can fail to lead to a fair prediction model in practice. (b) Rather than rely on regularizers (that lead to optimization problems that are difficult to solve) and corresponding regularization parameters (that can be expensive to tune), we propose a strategy that employs hard constraints so that specific tolerances for unfairness can be enforced without the complications associated with the use of regularization. (c) Our proposed strategy readily allows for constraints on multiple (potentially conflicting) unfairness measures at the same time. Multiple measures can be considered with a regularization approach, but at the cost of having even more difficult optimization problems to solve and further expense for tuning. By contrast, through hard constraints, our strategy leads to optimization models that can be solved tractably with minimal tuning.

公平学习约束优化非凸优化

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。