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FairDRO: Group fairness regularization via classwise robust optimization

delete2025-02-01
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PRE
AI
T
Taeeon Park
S
Sangwon Jung
S
Sanghyuk Chun
T
Taesup Moon *
DOI:10.1016/j.neunet.2024.106891delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Existing group fairness-aware training methods fall into two categories: re-weighting underrepresented groups according to certain rules, or using regularization terms such as smoothed approximations of fairness metrics or surrogate statistical quantities. While each category has its own strength inapplicability or performance when compared to each other, their successful performances are typically limited to specific cases. To that end, we propose a new approach called FairDRO, which takes advantage of both categories through a classwise group distributionally robust optimization (DRO) framework. Our method unifies re-weighting and regularization by incorporating a well-justified group fairness metric into the objective as regularization, but solving it through a principled re-weighting strategy. To optimize our resulting objective efficiently, we adopt an iterative algorithm and consequently develop two variants of FairDRO algorithm depending on the choice of surrogate loss. For in-depth understanding, we derive three theoretical results: (i) a closed-form solution for the correct re-weights; (ii) justifications for using the surrogate losses; and (iii) a convergence analysis of our method. Experimental results show that our algorithms consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance inaccuracy- fairness trade-offs across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating scalability and broad applicability compared to existing methods.
Keywords:
Trustworthy
Artificial intelligence
Group fairness
In-processing
Distributionally robust optimization

Journal

Neural Networks cover
Neural Networks
IF:
6.3
Papers:
7.8K
Citations:
3.0W

Organization

N
naver
Scholars:
152
Papers: 129
Citations: 1
S
seoul national university (snu)
Scholars:
7.2W
Papers: 6.6W
Citations: 86