arXiv:2605.24926cs.AI2026-05

用能量函数动态调节决策,让公平性在运行时持续保持

Energy Shields for Fairness

论文配图:Energy Shields for Fairness
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 引入能量函数驱动的随机干预机制,动态调节公平性
  • 同时保证短期公平性稳定和长期公平性趋近目标
  • 适合需要持续公平保障的实时决策系统

运行时公平性并非一次性约束,而是在一系列决策序列中动态评估的属性。传统静态分类器忽视历史决策,无法捕捉动态公平性。现有公平性防护机制采用确定性干预,一旦违反公平性阈值即强行纠正,容易引发剧烈波动。本文提出全新概念——能量防护(energy shields),一种轻量级、自适应控制器,通过物理启发的能量函数,对决策序列进行概率化调控:越不公,干预力度越强。该机制首次同时提供短时安全与长时活度保证——安全指运行公平性始终以高概率落在目标区间内,活度指公平性的极限值最终趋近目标区间。我们还提出了构造最小侵入性能量防护的合成方法,并在实验中验证其高效性。通过短时与长时公平性双重视角评估,本方法显著优于现有方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Runtime fairness is not a one-time constraint but a dynamic property evaluated over a sequence of decisions. To ensure fairness at runtime, it is necessary to account for past decisions, information neglected by conventional, static classifiers. Traditional fairness shields enforce runtime fairness abruptly, by intervening \emph{deterministically} whenever a sequence of decisions violates the target for a running fairness measure. This motivates our \emph{main conceptual contribution: \textbf{energy shields}.} An energy shield is a novel, lightweight, adaptive controller that monitors a sequence of decisions and intervenes \emph{probabilistically} to ensure runtime fairness smoothly, by utilizing physics-inspired energy functions to nudge the sequence toward fairness: the more unfair the decisions, the stronger the nudging force becomes. This makes energy shields the \emph{\textbf{first}} fairness shields to provide both \emph{short-term safety and long-term liveness guarantees}. Safety ensures that the running fairness measure stays within a running target interval with high probability, and liveness ensures that the limit of the fairness measure lies within the limit target interval. Intuitively, the short-term specifies the tolerated fairness values and the long-term specifies the desired fairness values. We also provide a synthesis procedure for constructing the least intrusive energy shield for a given target specification, and demonstrate its efficiency experimentally. We evaluate our energy shields against existing fairness shields through the lens of short- and long-term fairness.

公平性动态控制算法防护

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。