通过反事实干预消除图生成中的结构偏见,提升公平性与实用性。
Mitigating topology biases in Graph Diffusion via Counterfactual Intervention
- 基于因果模型构建反事实推理,直接在图拓扑上修正偏见
- 在前向扩散与逆向去噪中同步引入无偏处理,保持结构完整
- 无需标签或同步更新,适用于广泛图生成场景
图扩散模型在图生成任务中备受关注,但常继承并放大敏感属性(如性别、年龄、地区)带来的拓扑偏见,导致生成结果不公平。现有基于扩散的公平图生成方法受限于特定应用、需完整标签或同时更新图结构与节点属性,难以通用。为此,本文提出公平图扩散模型(FairGDiff),一种基于反事实干预的一步式解决方案,可在不依赖标签的情况下缓解拓扑偏见,同时平衡公平性与实用性。我们构建因果模型以捕捉敏感属性、偏见链接形成与图结构之间的关系。通过回答反事实问题“若敏感属性不同,图结构是否改变?”,估计无偏处理并融入扩散过程。FairGDiff将反事实学习集成至前向扩散与逆向去噪阶段,确保生成图与敏感属性无关,同时保留结构完整性。在真实数据集上的大量实验表明,FairGDiff在公平性与实用性之间取得更优权衡,优于现有方法且具备良好可扩展性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Graph diffusion models have gained significant attention in graph generation tasks, but they often inherit and amplify topology biases from sensitive attributes (e.g. gender, age, region), leading to unfair synthetic graphs. Existing fair graph generation using diffusion models is limited to specific graph-based applications with complete labels or requires simultaneous updates for graph structure and node attributes, making them unsuitable for general usage. To relax these limitations by applying the debiasing method directly on graph topology, we propose Fair Graph Diffusion Model (FairGDiff), a counterfactual-based one-step solution that mitigates topology biases while balancing fairness and utility. In detail, we construct a causal model to capture the relationship between sensitive attributes, biased link formation, and the generated graph structure. By answering the counterfactual question "Would the graph structure change if the sensitive attribute were different?", we estimate an unbiased treatment and incorporate it into the diffusion process. FairGDiff integrates counterfactual learning into both forward diffusion and backward denoising, ensuring that the generated graphs are independent of sensitive attributes while preserving structural integrity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that FairGDiff achieves a superior trade-off between fairness and utility, outperforming existing fair graph generation methods while maintaining scalability.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。