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Algorithmic fairness is becoming increasingly important in data mining and machine learning. Among others, a foundational notation is group fairness. The vast majority of the existing works on group fairness, with a few exceptions, primarily focus on debiasing with respect to a single sensitive attribute, despite the fact that the co-existence of multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, marital status, etc.) in the real-world is commonplace. As such, methods that can ensure a fair learning outcome with respect to all sensitive attributes of concern simultaneously need to be developed. In this paper, we study the problem of information-theoretic intersectional fairness (InfoFair), where statistical parity, a representative group fairness measure, is guaranteed among demographic groups formed by multiple sensitive attributes of interest. We formulate it as a mutual information minimization problem and propose a generic end-to-end algorithmic framework to solve it. The key idea is to leverage a variational representation of mutual information, which considers the variational distribution between learning outcomes and sensitive attributes, as well as the density ratio between the variational and the original distributions. Our proposed framework is generalizable to many different settings, including other statistical notions of fairness, and could handle any type of learning task equipped with a gradientbased optimizer. Empirical evaluations in the fair classification task on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework can effectively debias the classification results with minimal impact to the classification accuracy.
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FADES: Fair Disentanglement with Sensitive Relevance
Learning fair representation in deep learning is essential to mitigate discriminatory outcomes and enhance trustworthiness. However previous research has been commonly established on inappropriate assumptions prone to unrealistic counterfactuals and performance degradation. Although some proposed alternative approaches such as employing correlation-aware causal graphs or proxies for mutual information these methods are less practical and not applicable in general. In this work we propose FAir DisEntanglement with Sensitive relevance (FADES) a novel approach that leverages conditional mutual information from the information theory perspective to address these challenges. We employ sensitive relevant code to direct correlated information between target labels and sensitive attributes by imposing conditional independence allowing better separation of the features of interest in the latent space. Utilizing an intuitive disentangling approach FADES consistently achieves superior performance and fairness both quantitatively and qualitatively with its straightforward structure. Specifically the proposed method outperforms existing works in downstream classification and counterfactual generations on various benchmarks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2146091
- PAR ID:
- 10525251
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Learning fair representations is an essential task to reduce bias in data-oriented decision making. It protects minority subgroups by requiring the learned representations to be independent of sensitive attributes. To achieve independence, the vast majority of the existing work primarily relaxes it to the minimization of the mutual information between sensitive attributes and learned representations. However, direct computation of mutual information is computationally intractable, and various upper bounds currently used either are still intractable or contradict the utility of the learned representations. In this paper, we introduce distance covariance as a new dependence measure into fair representation learning. By observing that sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, and age group) are typically categorical, the distance covariance can be converted to a tractable penalty term without contradicting the utility desideratum. Based on the tractable penalty, we propose FairDisCo, a variational method to learn fair representations. Experiments demonstrate that FairDisCo outperforms existing competitors for fair representation learning.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
