arXiv:2605.16446cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

提出在线调控方法,解决表格公平自监督学习中的失效问题。

Avoiding Structural Failure Modes in Tabular Fair SSL: Online Primal-Dual Allocation under Confidence Gating

  • 基于置信度门控设计动态惩罚调度机制
  • 在多个基准上避免伪标签崩溃与平凡饱和
  • 无需调参即可实现公平与效用的稳定平衡

半监督学习可在标签有限时进行预测,但医疗、信贷等高风险表格应用需统计公平性保障。我们通过诊断压力测试发现:在置信度门控的伪标签策略下,基于矩匹配的公平性正则化会引发两种失效模式——掩码崩溃(公平性削弱置信度,导致伪标签匮乏)与平凡饱和(模型退化为常数预测)。为此提出在线原对偶分配(OPDA),通过违反度、风险与伪标签健康信号,动态调度公平性与熵稳定性惩罚,避免对每数据集手动设定固定公平权重。在Adult、ACSIncome、COMPAS等表格基准上,OPDA有效缓解了静态权重与简单自适应基线下的退化现象。在Adult和COMPAS上达到与经验最优静态λ相当的非退化工作点;在ACSIncome上保持更高效用且公平-效用区间更宽。相较OPDA-lite,完整控制器在ACSIncome上提升效用,在Adult上凸显公平-效用权衡。结果表明,OPDA可作为无需调参的控制器,实现表格公平自监督学习中非退化的稳定工作点。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) enables prediction with limited labels, but high-stakes tabular applications (medical, credit, recidivism) require statistical fairness guarantees. We identify a structural conflict in tabular fair SSL through a diagnostic stress test: under confidence-gated pseudo-labeling, moment-matching fairness regularizers can trigger two failure modes -- Masking Collapse (fairness erodes confidence, starving pseudo-labels) and Trivial Saturation (drift to constant predictors). We propose Online Primal-Dual Allocation (OPDA), an online controller that schedules fairness and entropy-based stability penalties using violation, risk, and pseudo-label health signals, avoiding per-dataset selection of a fixed fairness weight within this diagnostic regime. On the evaluated tabular benchmarks (Adult, ACSIncome, COMPAS), OPDA mitigates the degenerate regimes observed under static weighting and simple single-signal adaptive baselines. On Adult and COMPAS, it yields non-degenerate operating points competitive with the empirical static-$λ$ frontier; on ACSIncome, it preserves utility with a wider fairness-utility spread. Relative to OPDA-lite, the full controller mainly shifts the operating point toward higher utility on ACSIncome, while Adult highlights the fairness-utility trade-off between the two variants. These results position OPDA as a calibration-free controller for non-degenerate operating points in tabular fair SSL without per-dataset tuning.

公平学习自监督表格数据在线优化

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