提出可调控公平性的联邦学习框架,平衡全局与局部公平性。
FedFACT: A Provable Framework for Controllable Group-Fairness Calibration in Federated Learning
- 通过贝叶斯最优分类器建模公平约束,实现公平性与性能的统一优化。
- 在多类场景下同时提升全局与局部公平性,且准确率损失最小。
- 适合关注公平性与模型性能权衡的联邦学习研究者与应用开发者。
随着联邦学习在决策场景中的广泛应用,调节模型公平性以避免敏感群体(如女性、男性)间的差异变得至关重要。当前研究主要关注两种群组公平性:全局公平性(所有客户端间整体模型差异)和局部公平性(每个客户端内部的差异)。然而,公平性度量的不可分解性和非可微性带来了两个根本性挑战:(i) 在多分类场景中协调全局与局部公平性;(ii) 实现可控的、最优的准确率-公平性权衡。为此,我们提出一种新型可调控联邦群组公平性校准框架 FedFACT。FedFACT 在全局与局部公平性约束下识别贝叶斯最优分类器,实现性能下降最小的同时保证公平性。基于最优公平分类器的表征,我们将公平联邦学习重新形式化为个性化代价敏感学习(用于事前处理)和双层优化(用于事后处理)。理论上,我们为 FedFACT 提供了收敛性和泛化性保证,使其在给定公平性水平下逼近近似最优准确率。在多个数据集及不同数据异质性条件下进行的大量实验表明,FedFACT 在平衡准确率与全局-局部公平性方面始终优于基线方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
With the emerging application of Federated Learning (FL) in decision-making scenarios, it is imperative to regulate model fairness to prevent disparities across sensitive groups (e.g., female, male). Current research predominantly focuses on two concepts of group fairness within FL: Global Fairness (overall model disparity across all clients) and Local Fairness (the disparity within each client). However, the non-decomposable, non-differentiable nature of fairness criteria poses two fundamental, unresolved challenges for fair FL: (i) Harmonizing global and local fairness, especially in multi-class setting; (ii) Enabling a controllable, optimal accuracy-fairness trade-off. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel controllable federated group-fairness calibration framework, named FedFACT. FedFACT identifies the Bayes-optimal classifiers under both global and local fairness constraints, yielding models with minimal performance decline while guaranteeing fairness. Building on the characterization of the optimal fair classifiers, we reformulate fair federated learning as a personalized cost-sensitive learning problem for in-processing and a bi-level optimization for post-processing. Theoretically, we provide convergence and generalization guarantees for FedFACT to approach the near-optimal accuracy under given fairness levels. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets across various data heterogeneity demonstrate that FedFACT consistently outperforms baselines in balancing accuracy and global-local fairness.
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