arXiv:2512.09467cs.LG2025-12被引 1

提出一种基于柯西-施瓦茨散度的公平性正则化方法,提升模型在不同群体间的公平性表现。

Cauchy-Schwarz Fairness Regularizer

  • 用柯西-施瓦茨散度衡量敏感属性下预测分布的差异
  • 在多个数据集上显著提升平等机会与人口均等指标
  • 适用于多敏感属性且对超参数变化更稳定,适合实际部署

机器学习中的群体公平性通常通过添加正则化项来降低模型预测与敏感属性之间的依赖关系。然而,现有正则化方法基于异质的距离度量和设计选择,行为难以解释且跨任务表现不一致。本文首先将现有方法归为三类:(i) 匹配敏感群体的预测统计量,(ii) 对齐隐式表示,(iii) 直接最小化预测与敏感属性的依赖。基于此,我们识别出理想距离度量应具备紧致泛化界、对尺度差异鲁棒、可处理任意预测分布等特性。据此,提出柯西-施瓦茨(CS)公平性正则化器,惩罚条件于敏感群体的预测分布间的经验柯西-施瓦茨散度。在高斯比较下,证明该散度优于KL散度、最大均值差异及人口均等中使用的均值差异,并讨论其转化为无分布、基于核的估计器,天然支持多敏感属性。在四个表格基准和一个图像数据集上的大量实验表明,所提方法在保持竞争力准确率的同时,持续改善人口均等与平等机会指标,且在超参数变化下具有更稳定的效用-公平权衡。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Group fairness in machine learning is often enforced by adding a regularizer that reduces the dependence between model predictions and sensitive attributes. However, existing regularizers are built on heterogeneous distance measures and design choices, which makes their behavior hard to reason about and their performance inconsistent across tasks. This raises a basic question: what properties make a good fairness regularizer? We address this question by first organizing existing in-process methods into three families: (i) matching prediction statistics across sensitive groups, (ii) aligning latent representations, and (iii) directly minimizing dependence between predictions and sensitive attributes. Through this lens, we identify desirable properties of the underlying distance measure, including tight generalization bounds, robustness to scale differences, and the ability to handle arbitrary prediction distributions. Motivated by these properties, we propose a Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) fairness regularizer that penalizes the empirical CS divergence between prediction distributions conditioned on sensitive groups. Under a Gaussian comparison, we show that CS divergence yields a tighter bound than Kullback-Leibler divergence, Maximum Mean Discrepancy, and the mean disparity used in Demographic Parity, and we discuss how these advantages translate to a distribution-free, kernel-based estimator that naturally extends to multiple sensitive attributes. Extensive experiments on four tabular benchmarks and one image dataset demonstrate that the proposed CS regularizer consistently improves Demographic Parity and Equal Opportunity metrics while maintaining competitive accuracy, and achieves a more stable utility-fairness trade-off across hyperparameter settings compared to prior regularizers.

公平性正则化机器学习群体公平

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