Training a fair machine learning model is essential to prevent demographic disparity. Existing techniques for improving model fairness require broad changes in either data preprocessing or model training, rendering themselves difficult-to-adopt for potentially already complex machine learning systems. We address this problem via the lens of bilevel optimization. While keeping the standard training algorithm as an inner optimizer, we incorporate an outer optimizer so as to equip the inner problem with an additional functionality: Adaptively selecting minibatch sizes for the purpose of improving model fairness. Our batch selection algorithm, which we call FairBatch, implements this optimization and supports prominent fairness measures: equal opportunity, equalized odds, and demographic parity. FairBatch comes with a significant implementation benefit -- it does not require any modification to data preprocessing or model training. For instance, a single-line change of PyTorch code for replacing batch selection part of model training suffices to employ FairBatch. Our experiments conducted both on synthetic and benchmark real data demonstrate that FairBatch can provide such functionalities while achieving comparable (or even greater) performances against the state of the arts. Furthermore, FairBatch can readily improve fairness of any pre-trained model simply via fine-tuning. It is also compatible with existing batch selection techniques intended for different purposes, such as faster convergence, thus gracefully achieving multiple purposes.
Responsible AI is becoming critical as AI is widely used in our everyday lives. Many companies that deploy AI publicly state that when training a model, we not only need to improve its accuracy, but also need to guarantee that the model does not discriminate against users (fairness), is resilient to noisy or poisoned data (robustness), is explainable, and more. In addition, these objectives are not only relevant to model training, but to all steps of end-to-end machine learning, which include data collection, data cleaning and validation, model training, model evaluation, and model management …
FairAdaBN: Mitigating unfairness with adaptive batch normalization and its application to dermatological disease classification
Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学苏州高等研究院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学生命科学与医学部生物医学工程学院）
Leibniz University, Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；L3S Research Center, Hannover（汉诺威L3S研究中心）
The wide spread usage of automated data-driven decision support systems has raised a lot of concerns regarding accountability and fairness of the employed models in the absence of human supervision. Existing fairness-aware approaches tackle fairness as a batch learning problem and aim at learning a fair model which can then be applied to future instances of the problem. In many applications, however, the data comes sequentially and its characteristics might evolve with time. In such a setting, it is counter-intuitive to "fix" a (fair) model over the data stream as changes in the data might inc…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；BenevolentAI（BenevolentAI公司）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Human Technopole（人类技术园）
Learning meaningful representations of data that can address challenges such as batch effect correction and counterfactual inference is a central problem in many domains including computational biology. Adopting a Conditional VAE framework, we show that marginal independence between the representation and a condition variable plays a key role in both of these challenges. We propose the Contrastive Mixture of Posteriors (CoMP) method that uses a novel misalignment penalty defined in terms of mixtures of the variational posteriors to enforce this independence in latent space. We show that CoMP h…
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Despite the success of large-scale empirical risk minimization (ERM) at achieving high accuracy across a variety of machine learning tasks, fair ERM is hindered by the incompatibility of fairness constraints with stochastic optimization. We consider the problem of fair classification with discrete sensitive attributes and potentially large models and data sets, requiring stochastic solvers. Existing in-processing fairness algorithms are either impractical in the large-scale setting because they require large batches of data at each iteration or they are not guaranteed to converge. In this pape…
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Fairness and robustness are critical elements of Trustworthy AI that need to be addressed together. Fairness is about learning an unbiased model while robustness is about learning from corrupted data, and it is known that addressing only one of them may have an adverse affect on the other. In this work, we propose a sample selection-based algorithm for fair and robust training. To this end, we formulate a combinatorial optimization problem for the unbiased selection of samples in the presence of data corruption. Observing that solving this optimization problem is strongly NP-hard, we propose a…
Debias Anything: Fairness with Diversity without Supervision in Diffusion Models
Criteo AI Lab（Criteo AI实验室）；ESSEC Business School（ESSEC商学院）；CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学中央理工-高等电力学院）；FairPlay joint team（FairPlay联合团队）
AdapFair: Ensuring Adaptive Fairness for Machine Learning Operations
Department of Information Systems and Intelligent Business, School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University（信息系统与智能商业系，管理学院，西安交通大学）；School of Statistics and Data Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（统计与数据科学学院，上海财经大学）
The success of DNNs is driven by the counter-intuitive ability of over-parameterized networks to generalize, even when they perfectly fit the training data. In practice, test error often continues to decrease with increasing over-parameterization, referred to as double descent. This allows practitioners to instantiate large models without having to worry about over-fitting. Despite its benefits, however, prior work has shown that over-parameterization can exacerbate bias against minority subgroups. Several fairness-constrained DNN training methods have been proposed to address this concern. He…
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Colleges and universities use predictive analytics in a variety of ways to increase student success rates. Despite the potential for predictive analytics, two major barriers exist to their adoption in higher education: (a) the lack of democratization in deployment, and (b) the potential to exacerbate inequalities. Education researchers and policymakers encounter numerous challenges in deploying predictive modeling in practice. These challenges present in different steps of modeling including data preparation, model development, and evaluation. Nevertheless, each of these steps can introduce ad…
LiLAW: Lightweight Learnable Adaptive Weighting to Learn Sample Difficulty & Improve Noisy Training
Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Department of Mathematics（数学系）；The Hospital for Sick Children（圣·玛利亚医院）；Department of Statistics（统计学系）；UHN KITE Research Institute（UHN KITE研究所）；T-CAIREM；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程研究所）；Rehabilitation Sciences Institute（康复科学研究所）
