arXiv:2511.09889cs.LGcs.AI2025-11

提出可线性扩展的公平聚类框架,让大模型聚类快十倍且保持公平性。

A General Anchor-Based Framework for Scalable Fair Clustering

  • 用公平采样选少量锚点,再通过图优化传播标签
  • 在多个大规模数据集上提速数个数量级,性能不降
  • 适合需要高效公平聚类的工业级应用

公平聚类对减少无监督学习中的偏差至关重要,但现有算法常具二次或超二次计算复杂度,难以应用于大规模数据。为此,我们提出锚点式公平聚类框架(AFCF),一种通用、即插即用的新框架,使任意公平聚类算法实现线性时间可扩展性。该方法首先通过新颖的公平采样策略选取少量代表性锚点;随后,任意现成公平聚类算法可作用于该小锚点集。其核心为新型锚点图构建模块,将标签传播建模为优化问题,并通过精心设计的组-标签联合约束,理论证明最终全数据集聚类的公平性与锚点聚类一致。该优化问题通过基于ADMM的算法高效求解。在多个大规模基准上的大量实验表明,AFCF显著加速了先进方法,计算时间降低数个数量级,同时保持强聚类性能和公平性保障。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

公平聚类线性扩展锚点方法

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