Alpha and Prejudice: Improving $α$-sized Worst-case Fairness via Intrinsic Reweighting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Jing, Yao, Yinghua, Pan, Yuangang, Wang, Xuanqian, Tsang, Ivor W., Fu, Xiuju
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Li, Jing
Yao, Yinghua
Pan, Yuangang
Wang, Xuanqian
Tsang, Ivor W.
Fu, Xiuju
author_facet Li, Jing
Yao, Yinghua
Pan, Yuangang
Wang, Xuanqian
Tsang, Ivor W.
Fu, Xiuju
contents Worst-case fairness with off-the-shelf demographics achieves group parity by maximizing the model utility of the worst-off group. Nevertheless, demographic information is often unavailable in practical scenarios, which impedes the use of such a direct max-min formulation. Recent advances have reframed this learning problem by introducing the lower bound of minimal partition ratio, denoted as $α$, as side information, referred to as ``$α$-sized worst-case fairness'' in this paper. We first justify the practical significance of this setting by presenting noteworthy evidence from the data privacy perspective, which has been overlooked by existing research. Without imposing specific requirements on loss functions, we propose reweighting the training samples based on their intrinsic importance to fairness. Given the global nature of the worst-case formulation, we further develop a stochastic learning scheme to simplify the training process without compromising model performance. Additionally, we address the issue of outliers and provide a robust variant to handle potential outliers during model training. Our theoretical analysis and experimental observations reveal the connections between the proposed approaches and existing ``fairness-through-reweighting'' studies, with extensive experimental results on fairness benchmarks demonstrating the superiority of our methods.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_03068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Alpha and Prejudice: Improving $α$-sized Worst-case Fairness via Intrinsic Reweighting
Li, Jing
Yao, Yinghua
Pan, Yuangang
Wang, Xuanqian
Tsang, Ivor W.
Fu, Xiuju
Machine Learning
Worst-case fairness with off-the-shelf demographics achieves group parity by maximizing the model utility of the worst-off group. Nevertheless, demographic information is often unavailable in practical scenarios, which impedes the use of such a direct max-min formulation. Recent advances have reframed this learning problem by introducing the lower bound of minimal partition ratio, denoted as $α$, as side information, referred to as ``$α$-sized worst-case fairness'' in this paper. We first justify the practical significance of this setting by presenting noteworthy evidence from the data privacy perspective, which has been overlooked by existing research. Without imposing specific requirements on loss functions, we propose reweighting the training samples based on their intrinsic importance to fairness. Given the global nature of the worst-case formulation, we further develop a stochastic learning scheme to simplify the training process without compromising model performance. Additionally, we address the issue of outliers and provide a robust variant to handle potential outliers during model training. Our theoretical analysis and experimental observations reveal the connections between the proposed approaches and existing ``fairness-through-reweighting'' studies, with extensive experimental results on fairness benchmarks demonstrating the superiority of our methods.
title Alpha and Prejudice: Improving $α$-sized Worst-case Fairness via Intrinsic Reweighting
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03068