arXiv Machine Learning

Assessing Predictive Models for Fairness Based on Activity-Space Patterns

The paper introduces a new framework for evaluating spatial fairness in predictive models by considering individuals’ activity spaces rather than just a single residential location. It proposes associating users with multiple geographic partitions and applying a spatial scan statistic to detect unfairness across these activity-space patterns. Experiments on synthetic datasets demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in identifying unfair treatment and retrieving affected objects, while highlighting a trade‑off in localization performance across resolutions.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
4d ago

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
5d ago

Individual Fairness via Local Predictive Consistency

The paper introduces a node‑level relaxation of individual fairness called local predictive consistency, where each prediction is compared to a similarity‑weighted average of predictions in its local neighborhood. This approach yields an interpretable fairness score and a regularized learning method based on local residuals, and it explicitly constructs the neighborhood graph with threshold selection guided by graph‑coverage diagnostics. The authors apply the method to binary classification, regression, and time‑to‑event prediction, and compare it with pairwise constraint‑based fairness formulations to analyze fairness‑performance trade‑offs.

By Zhouting Zhao, Tin Lok James Ng
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Fair Like Us? Auditing LLM Alignment in Resource Allocation

The paper "Fair Like Us? Auditing LLM Alignment in Resource Allocation" presents a method for evaluating how large language models reason about fairness in the allocation of scarce, indivisible resources. It compares LLMs’ first‑person fairness judgments with human responses across various scenarios, finding that models tend to favor stricter fairness constraints, exhibit more self‑interested behavior, and are sensitive to framing. The study also shows that current fine‑tuning datasets struggle to align LLM judgments with human ones.

By Qishen Han, Hadi Hosseini, Joshua Kavner, Samarth Khanna, Sujoy Sikdar, Lirong Xia
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
arXiv Statistics ML
5d ago

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 AI
Aug 28

Fairness Invariants: A Relational Approach to Explaining and Mitigating Fairness Bugs

The paper introduces REMI, a framework that treats counterfactual fairness as a relational invariant discovery problem. By learning over paired examples, REMI identifies input regions where fairness is violated and generates interpretable rule-based models—fairness invariants—that can block or relabel unfair predictions without retraining the underlying model. Experiments on symbolic and neural network programs show REMI localizes fairness bugs in over 83% of cases and reduces discriminatory decisions in black-box models by up to 70%.

By Ranit Debnath Akash, Ashish Kumar, Gang Tan, Saeid Tizpaz-Niari