Fair Representation : Guaranteeing Approximate Multiple Group Fairness for Unknown Tasks

Motivated by scenarios where data is used for diverse prediction tasks, we study whether fair representation can be used to guarantee fairness for unknown tasks and for multiple fairness notions. We consider seven group fairness notions that cover the concepts of independence, separation, and calibr...

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Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence. - 1979. - 45(2023), 1 vom: 07. Jan., Seite 525-538
1. Verfasser: Shen, Xudong (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Wong, Yongkang, Kankanhalli, Mohan
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence
Schlagworte:Journal Article
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Motivated by scenarios where data is used for diverse prediction tasks, we study whether fair representation can be used to guarantee fairness for unknown tasks and for multiple fairness notions. We consider seven group fairness notions that cover the concepts of independence, separation, and calibration. Against the backdrop of the fairness impossibility results, we explore approximate fairness. We prove that, although fair representation might not guarantee fairness for all prediction tasks, it does guarantee fairness for an important subset of tasks-the tasks for which the representation is discriminative. Specifically, all seven group fairness notions are linearly controlled by fairness and discriminativeness of the representation. When an incompatibility exists between different fairness notions, fair and discriminative representation hits the sweet spot that approximately satisfies all notions. Motivated by our theoretical findings, we propose to learn both fair and discriminative representations using pretext loss which self-supervises learning, and Maximum Mean Discrepancy as a fair regularizer. Experiments on tabular, image, and face datasets show that using the learned representation, downstream predictions that we are unaware of when learning the representation indeed become fairer. The fairness guarantees computed from our theoretical results are all valid
Beschreibung:Date Completed 05.04.2023
Date Revised 05.04.2023
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE
ISSN:1939-3539
DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2022.3148905