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Main Authors: Xin, Haoran, Sun, Ying, Wang, Chao, Yu, Yanke, Zhang, Weijia, Xiong, Hui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19473
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author Xin, Haoran
Sun, Ying
Wang, Chao
Yu, Yanke
Zhang, Weijia
Xiong, Hui
author_facet Xin, Haoran
Sun, Ying
Wang, Chao
Yu, Yanke
Zhang, Weijia
Xiong, Hui
contents Despite the success of recommender systems in alleviating information overload, fairness issues have raised concerns in recent years, potentially leading to unequal treatment for certain user groups. While efforts have been made to improve recommendation fairness, they often assume that users' sensitive attributes are available during model training. However, collecting sensitive information can be difficult, especially on platforms that involve no personal information disclosure. Therefore, we aim to improve recommendation fairness without any access to sensitive attributes. However, this is a non-trivial task because uncovering latent sensitive patterns from complicated user behaviors without explicit sensitive attributes can be difficult. Consequently, suboptimal estimates of sensitive distributions can hinder the fairness training process. To address these challenges, leveraging the remarkable reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a novel LLM-enhanced framework for Fair recommendation withOut Sensitive Attributes (LLMFOSA). A Multi-Persona Sensitive Information Inference module employs LLMs with distinct personas that mimic diverse human perceptions to infer and distill sensitive information. Furthermore, a Confusion-Aware Sensitive Representation Learning module incorporates inference results and rationales to develop robust sensitive representations, considering the mislabeling confusion and collective consensus among agents. The model is then optimized by a formulated mutual information objective. Extensive experiments on two public datasets validate the effectiveness of LLMFOSA in improving fairness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Recommendation Fairness without Sensitive Attributes Using Multi-Persona LLMs
Xin, Haoran
Sun, Ying
Wang, Chao
Yu, Yanke
Zhang, Weijia
Xiong, Hui
Information Retrieval
Despite the success of recommender systems in alleviating information overload, fairness issues have raised concerns in recent years, potentially leading to unequal treatment for certain user groups. While efforts have been made to improve recommendation fairness, they often assume that users' sensitive attributes are available during model training. However, collecting sensitive information can be difficult, especially on platforms that involve no personal information disclosure. Therefore, we aim to improve recommendation fairness without any access to sensitive attributes. However, this is a non-trivial task because uncovering latent sensitive patterns from complicated user behaviors without explicit sensitive attributes can be difficult. Consequently, suboptimal estimates of sensitive distributions can hinder the fairness training process. To address these challenges, leveraging the remarkable reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a novel LLM-enhanced framework for Fair recommendation withOut Sensitive Attributes (LLMFOSA). A Multi-Persona Sensitive Information Inference module employs LLMs with distinct personas that mimic diverse human perceptions to infer and distill sensitive information. Furthermore, a Confusion-Aware Sensitive Representation Learning module incorporates inference results and rationales to develop robust sensitive representations, considering the mislabeling confusion and collective consensus among agents. The model is then optimized by a formulated mutual information objective. Extensive experiments on two public datasets validate the effectiveness of LLMFOSA in improving fairness.
title Improving Recommendation Fairness without Sensitive Attributes Using Multi-Persona LLMs
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19473