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Fairness is becoming a rising concern in machine learning. Recent research has discovered that state-of-the-art models are amplifying social bias by making biased prediction towards some population groups (characterized by sensitive features like race or gender). Such unfair prediction among groups renders trust issues and ethical concerns in machine learning, especially for sensitive fields such as employment, criminal justice, and trust score assessment. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to improve machine learning fairness. The goal of our model is to minimize the influence of sensitive feature from the perspectives of both data input and predictive model. To achieve this goal, we reformulate the data input by eliminating the sensitive information and strengthen model fairness by minimizing the marginal contribution of the sensitive feature. We propose to learn the sensitive-irrelevant input via sampling among features and design an adversarial network to minimize the dependence between the reformulated input and the sensitive information. Empirical results validate that our model achieves comparable or better results than related state-of-the-art methods w.r.t. both fairness metrics and prediction performance.
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Towards Debiasing DNN Models from Spurious Feature Influence
Recent studies indicate that deep neural networks (DNNs) are prone to show discrimination towards certain demographic groups. We observe that algorithmic discrimination can be explained by the high reliance of the models on fairness sensitive features. Motivated by this observation, we propose to achieve fairness by suppressing the DNN models from capturing the spurious correlation between those fairness sensitive features with the underlying task. Specifically, we firstly train a bias-only teacher model which is explicitly encouraged to maximally employ fairness sensitive features for prediction. The teacher model then counter-teaches a debiased student model so that the interpretation of the student model is orthogonal to the interpretation of the teacher model. The key idea is that since the teacher model relies explicitly on fairness sensitive features for prediction, the orthogonal interpretation loss enforces the student network to reduce its reliance on sensitive features and instead capture more task relevant features for prediction. Experimental analysis indicates that our framework substantially reduces the model's attention on fairness sensitive features. Experimental results on four datasets further validate that our framework has consistently improved the fairness with respect to three group fairness metrics, with a comparable or even better accuracy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1939716
- PAR ID:
- 10397777
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 9521 to 9528
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i9.21185
