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1. Censored Fairness through Awareness

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26708  

   Zhang, Wenbin; Hernandez-Boussard, Tina; Weiss, Jeremy (June 2023, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   There has been increasing concern within the machine learning community and beyond that Artificial Intelligence (AI) faces a bias and discrimination crisis which needs AI fairness with urgency. As many have begun to work on this problem, most existing work depends on the availability of class label for the given fairness definition and algorithm which may not align with real-world usage. In this work, we study an AI fairness problem that stems from the gap between the design of a fair model in the lab and its deployment in the real-world. Specifically, we consider defining and mitigating individual unfairness amidst censorship, where the availability of class label is not always guaranteed due to censorship, which is broadly applicable in a diversity of real-world socially sensitive applications. We show that our method is able to quantify and mitigate individual unfairness in the presence of censorship across three benchmark tasks, which provides the first known results on individual fairness guarantee in analysis of censored data. 

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2. AI fairness in practice: Paradigm, challenges, and prospects

   https://doi.org/10.1002/aaai.12189  

   Zhang, Wenbin (September 2024, AI Magazine)

   Abstract Understanding and correcting algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important, leading to a surge in research on AI fairness within both the AI community and broader society. Traditionally, this research operates within the constrained supervised learning paradigm, assuming the presence of class labels, independent and identically distributed (IID) data, and batch‐based learning necessitating the simultaneous availability of all training data. However, in practice, class labels may be absent due to censoring, data is often represented using non‐IID graph structures that capture connections among individual units, and data can arrive and evolve over time. These prevalent real‐world data representations limit the applicability of existing fairness literature, which typically addresses fairness in static and tabular supervised learning settings. This paper reviews recent advances in AI fairness aimed at bridging these gaps for practical deployment in real‐world scenarios. Additionally, opportunities are envisioned by highlighting the limitations and significant potential for real applications. 

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3. SimFair: A Unified Framework for Fairness-Aware Multi-Label Classification

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i12.26677  

   Liu, Tianci; Wang, Haoyu; Wang, Yaqing; Wang, Xiaoqian; Su, Lu; Gao, Jing (June 2023, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Recent years have witnessed increasing concerns towards unfair decisions made by machine learning algorithms. To improve fairness in model decisions, various fairness notions have been proposed and many fairness-aware methods are developed. However, most of existing definitions and methods focus only on single-label classification. Fairness for multi-label classification, where each instance is associated with more than one labels, is still yet to establish. To fill this gap, we study fairness-aware multi-label classification in this paper. We start by extending Demographic Parity (DP) and Equalized Opportunity (EOp), two popular fairness notions, to multi-label classification scenarios. Through a systematic study, we show that on multi-label data, because of unevenly distributed labels, EOp usually fails to construct a reliable estimate on labels with few instances. We then propose a new framework named Similarity s-induced Fairness (sγ -SimFair). This new framework utilizes data that have similar labels when estimating fairness on a particular label group for better stability, and can unify DP and EOp. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on real-world datasets together demonstrate the advantage of sγ -SimFair over existing methods on multi-label classification tasks. 

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4. Counterfactual Fairness: Unidentification, Bound and Algorithm

   https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/199  

   Wu, Yongkai; Zhang, Lu; Wu, Xintao (August 2019, Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Fairness-aware learning studies the problem of building machine learning models that are subject to fairness requirements. Counterfactual fairness is a notion of fairness derived from Pearl's causal model, which considers a model is fair if for a particular individual or group its prediction in the real world is the same as that in the counterfactual world where the individual(s) had belonged to a different demographic group. However, an inherent limitation of counterfactual fairness is that it cannot be uniquely quantified from the observational data in certain situations, due to the unidentifiability of the counterfactual quantity. In this paper, we address this limitation by mathematically bounding the unidentifiable counterfactual quantity, and develop a theoretically sound algorithm for constructing counterfactually fair classifiers. We evaluate our method in the experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as compare with existing methods. The results validate our theory and show the effectiveness of our method. 

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5. Group Fairness with Individual and Censorship Constraints

   Wang, Zichong; Zhang, Wenbin (October 2024, The 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI))

   The widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based decision-making systems has raised a lot of concerns regarding potential discrimination, particularly in domains with high societal impact. Most existing fairness research focused on tackling bias relies heavily on the presence of class labels, an assumption that often mismatches real-world scenarios, which ignores the ubiquity of censored data. Further, existing works regard group fairness and individual fairness as two disparate goals, overlooking their inherent interconnection, i.e., addressing one can degrade the other. This paper proposes a novel unified method that aims to mitigate group unfairness under censorship while curbing the amplification of individual unfairness when enforcing group fairness constraints. Specifically, our introduced ranking algorithm optimizes individual fairness within the bounds of group fairness, uniquely accounting for censored information. Evaluation across four benchmark tasks confirms the effectiveness of our method in quantifying and mitigating both fairness dimensions in the face of censored data. 

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