提出新方法在不知身份信息时仍能准确评估搜索公平性。
Quantifying Query Fairness Under Unawareness
- 用量化技术推断群体归属,不依赖真实标签。
- 多属性下比现有方法更稳定,误差降低37%以上。
- 适合隐私保护场景下的公平性检测,如招聘、信贷系统。
传统排序算法常因数据偏差而对弱势群体不公平。公平性评估通常需知道项目的真实群体标签,但当群体由敏感属性定义时,这些标签往往未知,形成‘无意识公平性’问题。现有方法通过机器学习模型预测群体标签并统计占比,但在数据分布变化时结果不可靠。本文提出基于量化的新公平性估计器,可处理多类敏感属性,性能优于多个基线,在多种查询和群体组合下表现稳健。据我们所知,这是首个在多属性、多查询场景下实现可靠公平性评估的方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Traditional ranking algorithms are designed to retrieve the most relevant items for a user's query, but they often inherit biases from data that can unfairly disadvantage vulnerable groups. Fairness in information access systems (IAS) is typically assessed by comparing the distribution of groups in a ranking to a target distribution, such as the overall group distribution in the dataset. These fairness metrics depend on knowing the true group labels for each item. However, when groups are defined by demographic or sensitive attributes, these labels are often unknown, leading to a setting known as "fairness under unawareness". To address this, group membership can be inferred using machine-learned classifiers, and group prevalence is estimated by counting the predicted labels. Unfortunately, such an estimation is known to be unreliable under dataset shift, compromising the accuracy of fairness evaluations. In this paper, we introduce a robust fairness estimator based on quantification that effectively handles multiple sensitive attributes beyond binary classifications. Our method outperforms existing baselines across various sensitive attributes and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to establish a reliable protocol for measuring fairness under unawareness across multiple queries and groups.
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