提出无需完整敏感信息的图神经网络公平性正则化方法
Model-Agnostic Fairness Regularization for GNNs with Incomplete Sensitive Information
- 设计可适配任意模型的公平性正则化框架,仅需部分敏感属性
- 在5个真实数据集上显著降低偏差,同时保持高分类准确率
- 适合隐私受限场景下的公平图学习,尤其适用于敏感信息不全的现实应用
图神经网络(GNN)在节点分类和链接预测等关系学习任务中表现优异,但其应用引发严重公平性问题,可能加剧对种族、性别等受保护群体的社会偏见。这些偏见源于节点特征、图结构拓扑及消息传递机制。现有公平性感知的GNN方法依赖于敏感属性对所有节点完全可用的强假设,这在实际中因隐私与数据收集限制难以实现。为此,本文提出一种新型、模型无关的公平性正则化框架,适用于敏感属性仅部分可用的真实场景。该方法将平等机会与统计均等性作为可微正则项,整合进公平性目标函数。在五个真实世界基准数据集上的全面实证评估表明,所提方法显著降低了关键公平性指标的偏差,同时保持了具有竞争力的节点分类性能。结果表明,该框架在公平性-准确性权衡上持续优于基线模型,预测准确率下降极小。代码与数据集将公开发布于https://github.com/mtavassoli/GNN-FC。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated exceptional efficacy in relational learning tasks, including node classification and link prediction. However, their application raises significant fairness concerns, as GNNs can perpetuate and even amplify societal biases against protected groups defined by sensitive attributes such as race or gender. These biases are often inherent in the node features, structural topology, and message-passing mechanisms of the graph itself. A critical limitation of existing fairness-aware GNN methods is their reliance on the strong assumption that sensitive attributes are fully available for all nodes during training--a condition that poses a practical impediment due to privacy concerns and data collection constraints. To address this gap, we propose a novel, model-agnostic fairness regularization framework designed for the realistic scenario where sensitive attributes are only partially available. Our approach formalizes a fairness-aware objective function that integrates both equal opportunity and statistical parity as differentiable regularization terms. Through a comprehensive empirical evaluation across five real-world benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly mitigates bias across key fairness metrics while maintaining competitive node classification performance. Results show that our framework consistently outperforms baseline models in achieving a favorable fairness-accuracy trade-off, with minimal degradation in predictive accuracy. The datasets and source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/mtavassoli/GNN-FC.
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