Beyond Independent Manipulation: Individual Fairness-aware Strategic Classification with Peer Imitation

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Hauptverfasser: Lv, Xinpeng, Zheng, Chunyuan, Mao, Yunxin, Xu, Renzhe, Yang, Jinxuan, Chen, Yuanlong, Huang, Wangrong, Yang, Shaowu, Yang, Wenjing, Liu, Xinwang, Cui, Peng, Wang, Haotian
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Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Lv, Xinpeng
Zheng, Chunyuan
Mao, Yunxin
Xu, Renzhe
Yang, Jinxuan
Chen, Yuanlong
Huang, Wangrong
Yang, Shaowu
Yang, Wenjing
Liu, Xinwang
Cui, Peng
Wang, Haotian
author_facet Lv, Xinpeng
Zheng, Chunyuan
Mao, Yunxin
Xu, Renzhe
Yang, Jinxuan
Chen, Yuanlong
Huang, Wangrong
Yang, Shaowu
Yang, Wenjing
Liu, Xinwang
Cui, Peng
Wang, Haotian
contents Strategic classification (SC) investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions from predictive models. Existing fairness-aware SC approaches primarily focus on group fairness and typically assume that agents respond independently. However, when individual fairness is required, ensuring similar individuals receive similar outcomes, agents' manipulation becomes interdependent: an agent's preferred manipulation depends on the neighborhoods' outcomes. This induces a mismatch between classical SC formulations and fairness-aware decision settings, where independent models no longer accurately characterize strategic manipulations. To address this issue, we introduce individual fairness-aware strategic classification (IFSC), a framework that models peer-driven manipulation arising from individual fairness, where agents imitate nearby positively decided peers to obtain favorable outcomes. IFSC characterizes strategic manipulation as similarity-based imitation toward visible accepted peers and learns classifiers under the resulting post-manipulation distributions. To account for uncertainty in peer observability, IFSC employs a robust learning process that introduces stochastic perturbations during manipulation simulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that IFSC improves individual-fairness consistency and mitigates imitation-induced distortions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00827
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Independent Manipulation: Individual Fairness-aware Strategic Classification with Peer Imitation
Lv, Xinpeng
Zheng, Chunyuan
Mao, Yunxin
Xu, Renzhe
Yang, Jinxuan
Chen, Yuanlong
Huang, Wangrong
Yang, Shaowu
Yang, Wenjing
Liu, Xinwang
Cui, Peng
Wang, Haotian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Strategic classification (SC) investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions from predictive models. Existing fairness-aware SC approaches primarily focus on group fairness and typically assume that agents respond independently. However, when individual fairness is required, ensuring similar individuals receive similar outcomes, agents' manipulation becomes interdependent: an agent's preferred manipulation depends on the neighborhoods' outcomes. This induces a mismatch between classical SC formulations and fairness-aware decision settings, where independent models no longer accurately characterize strategic manipulations. To address this issue, we introduce individual fairness-aware strategic classification (IFSC), a framework that models peer-driven manipulation arising from individual fairness, where agents imitate nearby positively decided peers to obtain favorable outcomes. IFSC characterizes strategic manipulation as similarity-based imitation toward visible accepted peers and learns classifiers under the resulting post-manipulation distributions. To account for uncertainty in peer observability, IFSC employs a robust learning process that introduces stochastic perturbations during manipulation simulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that IFSC improves individual-fairness consistency and mitigates imitation-induced distortions.
title Beyond Independent Manipulation: Individual Fairness-aware Strategic Classification with Peer Imitation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00827