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Main Authors: Yang, Yuning, Yu, Han, Gao, Tianrun, Xu, Xiaodong, Wang, Guangyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18732
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author Yang, Yuning
Yu, Han
Gao, Tianrun
Xu, Xiaodong
Wang, Guangyu
author_facet Yang, Yuning
Yu, Han
Gao, Tianrun
Xu, Xiaodong
Wang, Guangyu
contents The deep integration of foundation models (FM) with federated learning (FL) enhances personalization and scalability for diverse downstream tasks, making it crucial in sensitive domains like healthcare. Achieving group fairness has become an increasingly prominent issue in the era of federated foundation models (FFMs), since biases in sensitive attributes might lead to inequitable treatment for under-represented demographic groups. Existing studies mostly focus on achieving fairness with respect to a single sensitive attribute. This renders them unable to provide clear interpretability of dependencies among multiple sensitive attributes which is required to achieve group fairness. Our paper takes the first attempt towards a causal analysis of the relationship between group fairness across various sensitive attributes in the FFM. We extend the FFM structure to trade off multiple sensitive attributes simultaneously and quantify the causal effect behind the group fairness through causal discovery and inference. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness, offering insights into interpretability towards building trustworthy and fair FFM systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18732
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Group Fairness with Multiple Sensitive Attributes in Federated Foundation Models
Yang, Yuning
Yu, Han
Gao, Tianrun
Xu, Xiaodong
Wang, Guangyu
Machine Learning
The deep integration of foundation models (FM) with federated learning (FL) enhances personalization and scalability for diverse downstream tasks, making it crucial in sensitive domains like healthcare. Achieving group fairness has become an increasingly prominent issue in the era of federated foundation models (FFMs), since biases in sensitive attributes might lead to inequitable treatment for under-represented demographic groups. Existing studies mostly focus on achieving fairness with respect to a single sensitive attribute. This renders them unable to provide clear interpretability of dependencies among multiple sensitive attributes which is required to achieve group fairness. Our paper takes the first attempt towards a causal analysis of the relationship between group fairness across various sensitive attributes in the FFM. We extend the FFM structure to trade off multiple sensitive attributes simultaneously and quantify the causal effect behind the group fairness through causal discovery and inference. Extensive experiments validate its effectiveness, offering insights into interpretability towards building trustworthy and fair FFM systems.
title Towards Group Fairness with Multiple Sensitive Attributes in Federated Foundation Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18732