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As recommender systems have become more widespread and moved into areas with greater social impact, such as employment and housing, researchers have begun to seek ways to ensure fairness in the results that such systems produce. This work has primarily focused on developing recommendation approaches in which fairness metrics are jointly optimized along with recommendation accuracy. However, the previous work had largely ignored how individual preferences may limit the ability of an algorithm to produce fair recommendations. Furthermore, with few exceptions, researchers have only considered scenarios in which fairness is measured relative to a single sensitive feature or attribute (such as race or gender). In this paper, we present a re-ranking approach to fairness-aware recommendation that learns individual preferences across multiple fairness dimensions and uses them to enhance provider fairness in recommendation results. Specifically, we show that our opportunistic and metric-agnostic approach achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and fairness than prior re-ranking approaches and does so across multiple fairness dimensions.
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This content will become publicly available on October 8, 2025
It's Not You, It's Me: The Impact of Choice Models and Ranking Strategies on Gender Imbalance in Music Recommendation
As recommender systems are prone to various biases, mitigation approaches are needed to ensure that recommendations are fair to various stakeholders. One particular concern in music recommendation is artist gender fairness. Recent work has shown that the gender imbalance in the sector translates to the output of music recommender systems, creating a feedback loop that can reinforce gender biases over time. In this work, we examine whether algorithmic strategies or user behavior are a greater contributor to ongoing improvement (or loss) in fairness as models are repeatedly re-trained on new user feedback data. We simulate this repeated process to investigate the effects of ranking strategies and user choice models on gender fairness metrics. We find re-ranking strategies have a greater effect than user choice models on recommendation fairness over time.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2415042
- PAR ID:
- 10568004
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400705052
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 884 to 889
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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