arXiv:2608.26437cs.LG2026-08

通过过滤敏感关联边,提升图神经网络的公平性

Subgraph Filtering for Fair Graph Neural Networks

论文配图:Subgraph Filtering for Fair Graph Neural Networks
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 识别高偏见风险边:结合敏感同质性和中心度、三角闭包等结构特征
  • 每轮消息传递中随机过滤偏见边,保持整体图结构完整
  • 适合关注模型公平性的研究者,尤其在社交网络、推荐系统场景

图神经网络(GNN)即使在未使用敏感属性的情况下也可能表现出不公平行为,因为图拓扑和消息传递会传播与群体相关的信号,尤其是在敏感同质性存在的条件下。现有公平性增强的GNN方法主要在全局层面约束表示或预测分布,未能显式控制信息聚合过程中的局部结构路径。本文提出一种轻量级、与架构无关的框架SF-GNN,从源头缓解结构偏差。SF-GNN通过结合敏感同质性与结构传播放大器(包括枢纽参与度和三角闭包)识别易产生偏见的边,并在每轮消息传递中引入随机边过滤机制,选择性地削弱或移除这些边,同时保留其余图结构。训练过程中加入带预热策略的统计均等正则项以稳定优化。在五个基准数据集上的实验表明,SF-GNN在保持竞争性预测性能的同时实现了稳定的公平性提升,优于近期主流公平性GNN基线,在公平性-准确率权衡上表现更优。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Graph neural networks (GNNs) can exhibit unfair behavior even when sensitive attributes are excluded from node features, because graph topology and message passing propagate group-correlated signals under sensitive homophily. Existing fairness-aware GNN methods mainly constrain representations or prediction distributions at a global level, without explicitly controlling the local structural pathways through which biased information propagates during aggregation. We propose Subgraph Filtering for Fair Graph Neural Networks (SF-GNN), a lightweight and architecture-agnostic framework that mitigates structural bias at its source. SF-GNN identifies bias-prone edges by combining sensitive homophily with structural propagation amplifiers, including hub participation and triadic closure. It then incorporates stochastic edge filtering into each message-passing step to selectively downweight or remove these edges while preserving the remaining graph structure. Training further incorporates a statistical-parity regularizer with a warm-up schedule to stabilize optimization. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that SF-GNN achieves consistent fairness improvements while maintaining competitive predictive performance, leading to a better fairness--accuracy trade-off than recent fairness-aware GNN baselines.

图神经网络公平性结构过滤

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。