arXiv:2608.26209cs.SEcs.AI2026-08

提出关系式公平性不变量框架,自动定位并解释程序中的个体不公平问题。

Fairness Invariants: A Relational Approach to Explaining and Mitigating Fairness Bugs

论文配图:Fairness Invariants: A Relational Approach to Explaining and Mitigating Fairness Bugs
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将反事实公平性建模为关系不变量,通过双向约束识别不公平区域。
  • 在83%案例中定位真实公平性缺陷,黑盒模型歧视决策减少最高达70%。
  • 生成可解释规则作为防护机制,无需重训练即可修正不公平预测。

数据驱动的软件系统越来越多地应用于刑事司法、金融信贷等高风险社会经济领域。然而,这些系统常表现出个体歧视——即对仅在受保护属性(如种族、性别、年龄)上不同的相似个体产生不合理的差异结果。现有研究虽关注检测和量化此类缺陷,但仍缺乏系统性的解释与定位方法。当前解释技术多针对单个输入决策,难以处理歧视的内在关系性,而歧视本质在于原样本与反事实样本的对比。本文提出REMI框架,实现个体歧视的自动化定位、解释与缓解。受形式化方法中循环不变量合成启发,将反事实公平性视为关系不变量发现问题。设计双向关系解释框架,在成对样本$(x, x')$上学习,识别输入空间中公平性被破坏的区域。不同于传统单向蕴含对,本方法强制要求原样本与反事实样本结果一致。REMI采用三种数据对齐技术,推导出可解释的基于规则的模型,作为“公平性不变量”。这些规则充当防护屏障,可选择性阻断或重标不公平预测,无需重新训练模型。在符号与神经网络程序上的评估表明,REMI在超过83%的情况下定位到真实公平性缺陷,显著优于现有最先进基线,并使黑盒模型的歧视性决策减少高达70%。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Data-driven software systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes socio-economic domains, from criminal justice to financial lending. However, these systems often exhibit individual discrimination---unjustified disparities in which a program yields different outcomes for similar individuals who differ only in their protected attributes (e.g., race, gender, age). While existing research has focused on detecting and quantifying these bugs, there remains a critical lack of principled mechanisms to explain and localize individual fairness bugs. Current explanation techniques are largely designed for single-input decisions rather than the relational nature of discrimination, which inherently involves a comparison between an original and a counterfactual pair. We present REMI, a framework for the automated localization, explanation, and mitigation of individual discrimination. Inspired by loop-invariant synthesis in formal methods, we treat counterfactual fairness as a relational invariant discovery problem. We introduce a bidirectional relational explanation framework that learns over paired examples $(x, x')$ to identify regions of the input space where fairness is violated. Unlike traditional one-way implication pairs used in invariant inference, our approach enforces bidirectional constraints: requiring identical outcomes for both original and counterfactual samples. REMI utilizes three data-alignment techniques to infer interpretable rule-based models that act as "fairness invariants." These rules serve as guardrails to selectively block or relabel unfair predictions without requiring model retraining. Our evaluation on symbolic and neural network programs demonstrates that REMI localizes ground-truth fairness bugs in over 83% of cases, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and reducing discriminatory decisions in black-box models by up to 70%.

公平性反事实可解释性歧视检测

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