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Main Authors: Cerrato, Mattia, Köppel, Marius, Wolf, Philipp, Kramer, Stefan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03834
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author Cerrato, Mattia
Köppel, Marius
Wolf, Philipp
Kramer, Stefan
author_facet Cerrato, Mattia
Köppel, Marius
Wolf, Philipp
Kramer, Stefan
contents Fair Representation Learning (FRL) is a broad set of techniques, mostly based on neural networks, that seeks to learn new representations of data in which sensitive or undesired information has been removed. Methodologically, FRL was pioneered by Richard Zemel et al. about ten years ago. The basic concepts, objectives and evaluation strategies for FRL methodologies remain unchanged to this day. In this paper, we look back at the first ten years of FRL by i) revisiting its theoretical standing in light of recent work in deep learning theory that shows the hardness of removing information in neural network representations and ii) presenting the results of a massive experimentation (225.000 model fits and 110.000 AutoML fits) we conducted with the objective of improving on the common evaluation scenario for FRL. More specifically, we use automated machine learning (AutoML) to adversarially "mine" sensitive information from supposedly fair representations. Our theoretical and experimental analysis suggests that deterministic, unquantized FRL methodologies have serious issues in removing sensitive information, which is especially troubling as they might seem "fair" at first glance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03834
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle 10 Years of Fair Representations: Challenges and Opportunities
Cerrato, Mattia
Köppel, Marius
Wolf, Philipp
Kramer, Stefan
Machine Learning
Fair Representation Learning (FRL) is a broad set of techniques, mostly based on neural networks, that seeks to learn new representations of data in which sensitive or undesired information has been removed. Methodologically, FRL was pioneered by Richard Zemel et al. about ten years ago. The basic concepts, objectives and evaluation strategies for FRL methodologies remain unchanged to this day. In this paper, we look back at the first ten years of FRL by i) revisiting its theoretical standing in light of recent work in deep learning theory that shows the hardness of removing information in neural network representations and ii) presenting the results of a massive experimentation (225.000 model fits and 110.000 AutoML fits) we conducted with the objective of improving on the common evaluation scenario for FRL. More specifically, we use automated machine learning (AutoML) to adversarially "mine" sensitive information from supposedly fair representations. Our theoretical and experimental analysis suggests that deterministic, unquantized FRL methodologies have serious issues in removing sensitive information, which is especially troubling as they might seem "fair" at first glance.
title 10 Years of Fair Representations: Challenges and Opportunities
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03834