FairGT: A Fairness-aware Graph Transformer

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Luo, Renqiang, Huang, Huafei, Yu, Shuo, Zhang, Xiuzhen, Xia, Feng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Luo, Renqiang
Huang, Huafei
Yu, Shuo
Zhang, Xiuzhen
Xia, Feng
author_facet Luo, Renqiang
Huang, Huafei
Yu, Shuo
Zhang, Xiuzhen
Xia, Feng
contents The design of Graph Transformers (GTs) generally neglects considerations for fairness, resulting in biased outcomes against certain sensitive subgroups. Since GTs encode graph information without relying on message-passing mechanisms, conventional fairness-aware graph learning methods cannot be directly applicable to address these issues. To tackle this challenge, we propose FairGT, a Fairness-aware Graph Transformer explicitly crafted to mitigate fairness concerns inherent in GTs. FairGT incorporates a meticulous structural feature selection strategy and a multi-hop node feature integration method, ensuring independence of sensitive features and bolstering fairness considerations. These fairness-aware graph information encodings seamlessly integrate into the Transformer framework for downstream tasks. We also prove that the proposed fair structural topology encoding with adjacency matrix eigenvector selection and multi-hop integration are theoretically effective. Empirical evaluations conducted across five real-world datasets demonstrate FairGT's superiority in fairness metrics over existing graph transformers, graph neural networks, and state-of-the-art fairness-aware graph learning approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17169
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FairGT: A Fairness-aware Graph Transformer
Luo, Renqiang
Huang, Huafei
Yu, Shuo
Zhang, Xiuzhen
Xia, Feng
Machine Learning
Computers and Society
The design of Graph Transformers (GTs) generally neglects considerations for fairness, resulting in biased outcomes against certain sensitive subgroups. Since GTs encode graph information without relying on message-passing mechanisms, conventional fairness-aware graph learning methods cannot be directly applicable to address these issues. To tackle this challenge, we propose FairGT, a Fairness-aware Graph Transformer explicitly crafted to mitigate fairness concerns inherent in GTs. FairGT incorporates a meticulous structural feature selection strategy and a multi-hop node feature integration method, ensuring independence of sensitive features and bolstering fairness considerations. These fairness-aware graph information encodings seamlessly integrate into the Transformer framework for downstream tasks. We also prove that the proposed fair structural topology encoding with adjacency matrix eigenvector selection and multi-hop integration are theoretically effective. Empirical evaluations conducted across five real-world datasets demonstrate FairGT's superiority in fairness metrics over existing graph transformers, graph neural networks, and state-of-the-art fairness-aware graph learning approaches.
title FairGT: A Fairness-aware Graph Transformer
topic Machine Learning
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17169