arXiv:2512.00469cs.LGcs.AI2025-12被引 2

提出统一公平性框架,解决多任务学习中异构任务的偏见问题。

FairMT: Fairness for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Learning

  • 设计非对称公平约束聚合机制,适配分类、检测、回归三类任务
  • 在多个基准上实现显著公平提升,同时保持优异任务性能
  • 适合需要兼顾公平与多任务性能的研究者和工程实践

机器学习中的公平性研究主要集中在单任务场景,而具有异构任务(分类、检测、回归)和部分标签缺失的公平多任务学习(MTL)仍基本未被探索。现有方法多面向分类任务,难以扩展到连续输出,且无法建立统一的公平目标。此外,现有MTL优化结构与公平性不匹配:仅约束共享表征,导致任务头吸收偏见,引发不可控的任务特异性偏差。多数工作将公平性视为与效用的零和博弈,通过对称约束以牺牲优待群体为代价实现均等。本文提出FairMT,一个统一的公平感知多任务学习框架,支持三类任务在不完整监督下的学习。核心是异构非对称公平约束聚合机制,将任务依赖的非对称偏差整合为统一约束。通过原-对偶联合优化框架实现效用与公平性的协同优化,并引入头感知多目标优化代理,显式建模任务头引起的各向异性。在涵盖多种模态和监督模式的三个同质与异质多任务基准上,FairMT持续实现显著的公平性提升,同时保持优越的任务性能。代码将在论文接受后发布。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fairness in machine learning has been extensively studied in single-task settings, while fair multi-task learning (MTL), especially with heterogeneous tasks (classification, detection, regression) and partially missing labels, remains largely unexplored. Existing fairness methods are predominantly classification-oriented and fail to extend to continuous outputs, making a unified fairness objective difficult to formulate. Further, existing MTL optimization is structurally misaligned with fairness: constraining only the shared representation, allowing task heads to absorb bias and leading to uncontrolled task-specific disparities. Finally, most work treats fairness as a zero-sum trade-off with utility, enforcing symmetric constraints that achieve parity by degrading well-served groups. We introduce FairMT, a unified fairness-aware MTL framework that accommodates all three task types under incomplete supervision. At its core is an Asymmetric Heterogeneous Fairness Constraint Aggregation mechanism, which consolidates task-dependent asymmetric violations into a unified fairness constraint. Utility and fairness are jointly optimized via a primal--dual formulation, while a head-aware multi-objective optimization proxy provides a tractable descent geometry that explicitly accounts for head-induced anisotropy. Across three homogeneous and heterogeneous MTL benchmarks encompassing diverse modalities and supervision regimes, FairMT consistently achieves substantial fairness gains while maintaining superior task utility. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.

多任务学习公平性异构任务偏见缓解

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