arXiv:2512.21348cs.SEcs.AI2025-12中稿 · the 48th Internati…被引 1

通过调整数据相关性提升模型公平性,同时改善弱势群体性能。

Fairness Is Not Just Ethical: Performance Trade-Off via Data Correlation Tuning to Mitigate Bias in ML Software

  • 用Phi系数量化敏感属性与标签相关性,多目标优化缓解代理偏差。
  • 弱势群体真阳性率平均提升17.5%,三大公平性指标降低超50%。
  • 预处理方法中表现领先,适合追求高公平性与泛化能力的部署场景。

传统软件公平性研究多强调伦理和社会意义,却忽视了公平性本质上是因不同用户群体间性能差异而产生的核心软件质量问题。将公平性明确视为软件质量维度,不仅能带来伦理之外的实际收益,如提升弱势群体预测性能、增强分布外泛化能力及地理迁移性。然而,现有缓解偏见方法面临困境:预处理方法虽适用范围广,但效果普遍弱于后处理技术。为此,本文提出相关性调优(CoT),一种新型预处理方法,通过调节数据相关性来缓解偏见。CoT引入直观的Phi系数系统量化敏感属性与标签间的相关性,并采用多目标优化解决代理偏见问题。大量实验表明,CoT使弱势群体真阳性率平均提升17.5%,统计均等差(SPD)、平均机会差(AOD)和等机会差(EOD)三大偏见指标平均降低超50%。在单属性与多属性场景下,分别优于当前最优方法3和10个百分点。实验结果与源码将公开发布,以促进后续研究。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Traditional software fairness research typically emphasizes ethical and social imperatives, neglecting that fairness fundamentally represents a core software quality issue arising directly from performance disparities across sensitive user groups. Recognizing fairness explicitly as a software quality dimension yields practical benefits beyond ethical considerations, notably improved predictive performance for unprivileged groups, enhanced out-of-distribution generalization, and increased geographic transferability in real-world deployments. Nevertheless, existing bias mitigation methods face a critical dilemma: while pre-processing methods offer broad applicability across model types, they generally fall short in effectiveness compared to post-processing techniques. To overcome this challenge, we propose Correlation Tuning (CoT), a novel pre-processing approach designed to mitigate bias by adjusting data correlations. Specifically, CoT introduces the Phi-coefficient, an intuitive correlation measure, to systematically quantify correlation between sensitive attributes and labels, and employs multi-objective optimization to address the proxy biases. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that CoT increases the true positive rate of unprivileged groups by an average of 17.5% and reduces three key bias metrics, including statistical parity difference (SPD), average odds difference (AOD), and equal opportunity difference (EOD), by more than 50% on average. CoT outperforms state-of-the-art methods by three and ten percentage points in single attribute and multiple attributes scenarios, respectively. We will publicly release our experimental results and source code to facilitate future research.

公平性数据相关性预处理偏见缓解

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