跨域推荐会放大群体不公平,该文提出新框架有效缓解此问题。
The Double-Edged Sword of Knowledge Transfer: Diagnosing and Curing Fairness Pathologies in Cross-Domain Recommendation
- 通过自适应融合无标签数据平衡各群体的训练信号
- 用信息论方法重新分配跨域收益,实现公平分配
- 在多个数据集上降低不公平性且提升推荐效果
跨域推荐(CDR)通过利用源域的辅助信号来提升目标域的推荐质量,但最新研究表明,其可能无意中加剧群体层面的不公平。本文通过理论与实证分析揭示了两类核心问题:(i) 跨域差异传递,即源域中的群体不平等被系统性转移到目标域;(ii) 跨域信息增益的不公平分配,不同群体获得的跨域知识收益不均。为此,我们提出跨域公平增强(CDFA)框架,包含两个关键组件:首先,通过自适应整合无标签数据,均衡各群体训练信号的丰富度以缓解差异传递;其次,采用信息论方法重新分配跨域信息增益,确保群体间收益公平。在多个数据集和基线上的大量实验表明,该框架显著降低了跨域推荐中的不公平性,同时保持甚至提升了整体推荐性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) offers an effective strategy for improving recommendation quality in a target domain by leveraging auxiliary signals from source domains. Nonetheless, emerging evidence shows that CDR can inadvertently heighten group-level unfairness. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis to uncover why these fairness issues arise. Specifically, we identify two key challenges: (i) Cross-Domain Disparity Transfer, wherein existing group-level disparities in the source domain are systematically propagated to the target domain; and (ii) Unfairness from Cross-Domain Information Gain, where the benefits derived from cross-domain knowledge are unevenly allocated among distinct groups. To address these two challenges, we propose a Cross-Domain Fairness Augmentation (CDFA) framework composed of two key components. Firstly, it mitigates cross-domain disparity transfer by adaptively integrating unlabeled data to equilibrate the informativeness of training signals across groups. Secondly, it redistributes cross-domain information gains via an information-theoretic approach to ensure equitable benefit allocation across groups. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and baselines demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces unfairness in CDR without sacrificing overall recommendation performance, while even enhancing it.
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