arXiv Machine Learning

UniFair: A unified fair clustering approach based on separation and compactness

arXiv:2606. 04777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clustering is increasingly used to support high-impact decisions, yet standard objectives such as $k$-means can produce clusterings that treat demographic groups unequally.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Robust Mixture Models for Algorithmic Fairness Under Latent Heterogeneity

The paper introduces ROME, a framework that learns latent group structure while optimizing worst-group predictive performance. ROME links latent-variable modeling with distributionally robust optimization through an Expectation-Maximization approach for linear models and a neural Mixture-of-Experts for nonlinear settings. Experiments on simulations and three real-world regression datasets show that ROME improves worst-group performance while maintaining competitive overall accuracy compared to existing group-aware and group-label-free robust learning methods.

By Siqi Li, Molei Liu, Yiwei Lyu, Ziye Tian, Chuan Hong, Nan Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Individual Fairness in Hierarchical Clustering

The paper investigates hierarchical clustering under an individual fairness constraint that limits relative distortion within local k‑nearest neighborhoods. It formulates this as a feasibility problem over dominated ultrametrics, characterizes the minimal multiplicative slack needed, identifies a sharp local threshold, proves stability under bounded perturbations, establishes monotonicity in k, and demonstrates a Θ(log n) separation between local and global realizability. Experiments on synthetic and real‑world datasets corroborate the theoretical findings.

By Binita Maity, Shrutimoy Das
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Fairness-Aware Mixture-of-Experts via Subgroup Reweighting and Gate Regularization

The paper proposes a fairness-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that tackles routing-induced bias by applying subgroup reweighting to correct data imbalance and gate entropy regularization to prevent the gating network from collapsing onto subgroup attributes. This end-to-end approach keeps expert utilization balanced and interpretable, offering a clear view of how subgroups are allocated across experts. Experiments show that the method improves fairness while maintaining competitive predictive performance.

By Sunhee Hwang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

A Sub-4 Approximation for Fair $k$-Means

arXiv:2609.07974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness in clustering has attracted sustained research interest, motivated by the need to ensure equitable representation of protected groups in mac...

By Kangke Cheng, Guanlin Mo, Shihong Song, Hu Ding