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Main Authors: Lu, Jiahua, Liu, Huaxiao, Bai, Shuotong, Xu, Junjie, Luo, Renqiang, Dai, Enyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15499
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author Lu, Jiahua
Liu, Huaxiao
Bai, Shuotong
Xu, Junjie
Luo, Renqiang
Dai, Enyan
author_facet Lu, Jiahua
Liu, Huaxiao
Bai, Shuotong
Xu, Junjie
Luo, Renqiang
Dai, Enyan
contents Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse applications. However, due to the biases in the graph structures, graph neural networks face significant challenges in fairness. Although the original user graph structure is generally biased, it is promising to guide these existing structures toward unbiased ones by introducing new links. The fairness guidance via new links could foster unbiased communities, thereby enhancing fairness in downstream applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework named FairGuide. Specifically, to ensure fairness in downstream tasks trained on fairness-guided graphs, we introduce a differentiable community detection task as a pseudo downstream task. Our theoretical analysis further demonstrates that optimizing fairness within this pseudo task effectively enhances structural fairness, promoting fairness generalization across diverse downstream applications. Moreover, FairGuide employs an effective strategy which leverages meta-gradients derived from the fairness-guidance objective to identify new links that significantly enhance structural fairness. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method across a variety of graph-based fairness tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_15499
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Let's Grow an Unbiased Community: Guiding the Fairness of Graphs via New Links
Lu, Jiahua
Liu, Huaxiao
Bai, Shuotong
Xu, Junjie
Luo, Renqiang
Dai, Enyan
Machine Learning
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse applications. However, due to the biases in the graph structures, graph neural networks face significant challenges in fairness. Although the original user graph structure is generally biased, it is promising to guide these existing structures toward unbiased ones by introducing new links. The fairness guidance via new links could foster unbiased communities, thereby enhancing fairness in downstream applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework named FairGuide. Specifically, to ensure fairness in downstream tasks trained on fairness-guided graphs, we introduce a differentiable community detection task as a pseudo downstream task. Our theoretical analysis further demonstrates that optimizing fairness within this pseudo task effectively enhances structural fairness, promoting fairness generalization across diverse downstream applications. Moreover, FairGuide employs an effective strategy which leverages meta-gradients derived from the fairness-guidance objective to identify new links that significantly enhance structural fairness. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method across a variety of graph-based fairness tasks.
title Let's Grow an Unbiased Community: Guiding the Fairness of Graphs via New Links
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15499