arXiv:2605.10604cs.LGcs.AI2026-05被引 1

揭示公平与性能的权衡边界,发现最优决策规则是分组阈值策略。

Fairness vs Performance: Characterizing the Pareto Frontier of Algorithmic Decision Systems

  • 将决策建模为多目标优化,同时考虑决策者收益与群体公平性。
  • 帕累托前沿由确定性的分组阈值规则构成,可包含上界或下界规则。
  • 结果适用于各类算法流程,为公平决策提供理论依据,适合政策制定者参考。

设计公平的算法决策系统需在模型性能与受影响群体的公平性之间取得平衡:更高的公平性可能需要牺牲部分性能,反之亦然,但这种权衡空间仍不清晰。本文将二分类决策问题中的公平性建模为多目标优化问题,同时考虑决策者效用和群体公平性。研究了任意决策者效用函数、任意人口分布及多种群体公平度量下的帕累托最优决策规则集合。发现帕累托前沿由应用于个体成功概率的确定性、分组特定阈值规则构成。这补充了现有文献中针对特定公平约束的下界阈值规则结论。然而我们还表明,根据所用公平度量的不同,帕累托前沿可能包含上界阈值规则,即偏好成功概率较低的个体。结果显示,帕累托前沿的位置仅取决于人口特征、效用函数和公平得分,与算法技术设计无关——该结论对预处理、内处理和后处理方法均成立。本研究推广了现有的公平约束分类最优化定理,扩展至广义公平度量与公平原则,以及部分公平情形。论文将形式化公平研究与法律及伦理要求联系起来,为寻找更少歧视性的替代方案提供理论基础,有助于系统评估与比较算法决策机制。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Designing fair algorithmic decision systems requires balancing model performance with fairness toward affected individuals: More fairness might require sacrificing some performance and vice versa, yet the space of possible trade-offs is still poorly understood. We investigate fairness in binary prediction-based decision problems by conceptualizing decision making as a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously considers decision-maker utility and group fairness. We investigate the set of Pareto-optimal decision rules for arbitrary utility functions for decision maker, arbitrary population distributions, and a wide range of group fairness metrics. We find that the Pareto frontier consists of deterministic, group-specific threshold rules applied to individuals' success probability. This complements existing optimality theorems from literature which, for specific fairness constraints, posit lower-bound threshold rules only. However we also show that, depending on the used fairness metric, the Pareto frontier may include upper-bound threshold rules, thus preferring individuals with lower success probabilities. We show that the location of the Pareto frontier depends only on population characteristics, utility functions and fairness score, but not on the technical design of the algorithm - our findings hold for pre-, in-, and post-processing approaches alike. Our results generalize existing optimality theorems for fairness-constrained classification and extend them to generalized fairness metrics and fairness principles, and to partial fairness regimes. This paper connects formal fairness research with legal and ethical requirements to search for less discriminatory alternatives, offering a principled foundation for evaluating and comparing algorithmic decision systems.

算法公平决策系统帕累托优化

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