arXiv:2609.05759cs.IR2026-09

评估推荐系统中公平性、准确率与能耗的权衡关系。

What Price Fairness? Evaluating Energy - Fairness - Accuracy Trade-off in Recommender Systems

  • 对比了训练时、图重加权和推理后处理三类公平性方法。
  • 发现公平性干预导致能耗差异显著,后处理增加重复服务开销。
  • 强调需同时考量准确率、公平性和计算成本三者平衡。

公平性推荐系统旨在缓解推荐结果中用户、物品及提供者之间的可见性、相关性与机会分布不均问题。然而,现有评估多仅关注准确率与公平性,忽视其计算与环境成本。本文研究公平性干预对能耗的影响:比较了在多种模型、两个数据集及两种硬件配置下,训练时、图级重加权与推理后处理三类方法在训练与推理阶段的推荐质量、提供者曝光度与能耗表现。结果显示,公平性带来的绿色成本并非均一;后处理将成本转移至重复服务,而训练时与图重加权方法虽避免重排序开销,但在不同模型、数据集与硬件上表现差异大。研究呼吁将公平性推荐评估纳入准确率、公平性与计算成本的三者权衡框架。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fairness-aware recommender systems aim to mitigate systematic imbalances in recommendation outcomes, including how visibility, relevance, and opportunities are distributed among users, items, and providers. However, these systems are usually evaluated in terms of accuracy and fairness alone, while their computational and environmental costs remain largely invisible. This omission matters because fairness interventions may affect the cost of recommendation in different ways. Training-time methods modify model optimization, post-processing methods add computation at inference time, and both may depend on the model, dataset, hardware, and deployment setting. We examine whether provider-side fairness in recommendation comes with a measurable green cost. We compare in-processing, graph-level reweighting and post-processing interventions across multiple models, two datasets, and two hardware settings. We measure recommendation quality, provider-side exposure, and energy consumption separately across training and inference stages. Our results show that the green cost of fairness is not uniform, post-processing shifts cost to repeated serving, while in-processing and graph-level methods avoid re-ranking overhead but vary substantially across models, datasets, and hardware. Findings call for evaluating fairness-aware recommendation as a three-way trade-off between accuracy, fairness, and computational cost.

推荐系统公平性能耗三元权衡

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