We propose a novel algorithm for learning fair representations that can simultaneously mitigate two notions of disparity among different demographic subgroups in the classification setting. Two key components underpinning the design of our algorithm are balanced error rate and conditional alignment of representations. We show how these two components contribute to ensuring accuracy parity and equalized false-positive and false-negative rates across groups without impacting demographic parity. Furthermore, we also demonstrate both in theory and on two real-world experiments that the proposed algorithm leads to a better utility-fairness trade-off on balanced datasets compared with existing algorithms on learning fair representations for classification.
Learning data representations that are transferable and are fair with respect to certain protected attributes is crucial to reducing unfair decisions while preserving the utility of the data. We propose an information-theoretically motivated objective for learning maximally expressive representations subject to fairness constraints. We demonstrate that a range of existing approaches optimize approximations to the Lagrangian dual of our objective. In contrast to these existing approaches, our objective allows the user to control the fairness of the representations by specifying limits on unfairness. Exploiting duality, we introduce a method that optimizes the model parameters as well as the expressiveness-fairness trade-off. Empirical evidence suggests that our proposed method can balance the trade-off between multiple notions of fairness and achieves higher expressiveness at a lower computational cost.
In this paper, we propose FairNN a neural network that performs joint feature representation and classification for fairness-aware learning. Our approach optimizes a multi-objective loss function in which (a) learns a fair representation by suppressing protected attributes (b) maintains the information content by minimizing a reconstruction loss and (c) allows for solving a classification task in a fair manner by minimizing the classification error and respecting the equalized odds-based fairness regularized. Our experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that such a joint approach is superior to separate treatment of unfairness in representation learning or supervised learning. Additionally, our regularizers can be adaptively weighted to balance the different components of the loss function, thus allowing for a very general framework for conjoint fair representation learning and decision making.
In this work, we study auxiliary prediction tasks defined by temporal-difference networks (TD networks); these networks are a language for expressing a rich space of general value function (GVF) prediction targets that may be learned efficiently with TD. Through analysis in an illustrative domain we show the benefits to learning state representations of exploiting the full richness of TD networks, including both action-conditional predictions and temporally deep predictions. Our main (and perhaps surprising) result is that deep action-conditional TD networks with random structures that create random prediction-questions about random features yield state representations that are competitive with state-of-the-art hand-crafted value prediction and pixel control auxiliary tasks in both Atari games and DeepMind Lab tasks. We also show through stop-gradient experiments that learning the state representations solely via these unsupervised random TD network prediction tasks yield agents that outperform the end-to-end-trained actor-critic baseline.
People are rated and ranked, towards algorithmic decision making in an increasing number of applications, typically based on machine learning. Research on how to incorporate fairness into such tasks has prevalently pursued the paradigm of group fairness: giving adequate success rates to specifically protected groups. In contrast, the alternative paradigm of individual fairness has received relatively little attention, and this paper advances this less explored direction. The paper introduces a method for probabilistically mapping user records into a low-rank representation that reconciles individual fairness and the utility of classifiers and rankings in downstream applications. Our notion of individual fairness requires that users who are similar in all task-relevant attributes such as job qualification, and disregarding all potentially discriminating attributes such as gender, should have similar outcomes. We demonstrate the versatility of our method by applying it to classification and learning-to-rank tasks on a variety of real-world datasets. Our experiments show substantial improvements over the best prior work for this setting.
We consider the problem of learning representations that achieve group and subgroup fairness with respect to multiple sensitive attributes. Taking inspiration from the disentangled representation learning literature, we propose an algorithm for learning compact representations of datasets that are useful for reconstruction and prediction, but are also emph{flexibly fair}, meaning they can be easily modified at test time to achieve subgroup demographic parity with respect to multiple sensitive attributes and their conjunctions. We show empirically that the resulting encoder---which does not require the sensitive attributes for inference---enables the adaptation of a single representation to a variety of fair classification tasks with new target labels and subgroup definitions.