arXiv Machine Learning

Geometry of Relaxed Fair Regression: A Unified Framework for Aware and Unaware Settings

The paper introduces a unified framework for relaxed fair regression that applies to both aware and unaware settings. By modeling regression with a demographic parity penalty as an optimal transport problem, it characterizes optimal prediction functions under squared Wasserstein‑2 and Total Variation penalties, revealing distinct fairness philosophies. The authors also present FAUST, an efficient algorithm that consistently matches or surpasses state‑of‑the‑art baselines on real‑world benchmarks.

arXiv Statistics ML
Oct 28

Targeted Learning for Inference on Data Fairness

The paper introduces a targeted learning approach to assess fairness in the data generating process used for training predictive models, rather than focusing solely on model performance. It derives estimators for demographic parity, equal opportunity, and conditional mutual information, and demonstrates through simulations that these estimators improve confidence‑interval coverage and reduce false detections of population unfairness compared to fixed‑model inference. The authors also apply the method to real data to illustrate its practical utility.

By Joseph H. Rudoler, Alexander Asemota, Giles Hooker
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Functional Bilevel Optimization for Predictive Fairness

arXiv:2607. 05098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When sensitive attributes are continuous and high-dimensional $-$ demographic score vectors, posteriors over attributes, age or income profiles $-$ enforcing full statistical independence is often too restrictive, and existing relaxations rely on indirect dependence penalties or adversarial schemes that do not directly target the fairness-accuracy trade-off.

By Ieva Petrulionyte, Julien Mairal, Michael Arbel
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 28

FairSplit: Decomposing the Embedding Space for Fair Classification

FairSplit decomposes the embedding space into a Fair Space for prediction and a Sensitive Space that isolates sensitive information, using a learnable mask and the Hilbert‑Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to guide the separation. The method simultaneously trains for classification accuracy and independence from sensitive attributes, providing theoretical bounds on the demographic parity gap based on the Fair Space dimensionality and HSIC. It supports multiclass tasks and non‑binary sensitive attributes, achieving competitive accuracy‑fairness trade‑offs on established benchmarks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

The Statistical Fairness-Accuracy Frontier

The paper investigates the tradeoff between fairness and accuracy when a single predictive model serves multiple demographic groups. It introduces the fairness-accuracy (FA) Pareto frontier, which identifies models that cannot be improved in either dimension without compromising the other. Focusing on finite-sample settings, the authors derive worst‑case‑optimal estimators, analyze how limited data asymmetrically affect each group’s welfare, and provide uniform bounds along the entire FA frontier.

By Alireza Fallah, Michael I. Jordan, Annie Ulichney
arXiv AI
Jul 13

Tuning Derivatives for Causal Fairness in Machine Learning

arXiv:2605. 05882v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial-intelligence systems are becoming ubiquitous in society, yet their predictions typically inherit biases with respect to protected attributes such as race, gender, or age.

By Filip Edstr\"om, Guilherme W. F. Barros, Tetiana Gorbach, Xavier de Luna
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

A Model Ensemble-Based Post-Processing Framework for Fairness-Aware Prediction

The paper introduces a post‑processing framework that uses model ensembling to achieve fairness‑aware predictions. It is designed to work independently of any specific model internals, making it applicable to a wide range of learning tasks, model architectures, and fairness definitions. Experiments on classification, regression, and survival analysis show that the framework improves fairness while preserving predictive accuracy.

By Zhouting Zhao, Tin Lok James Ng