Training individually fair ML models with sensitive subspace robustness

Mikhail Yurochkin, Amanda Bower, Yuekai Sun

Keywords: adversarial, fairness, optimization, perturbation, robustness

Thurs Session 4 (17:00-19:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]
Thurs Session 5 (20:00-22:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]
Thursday: Fairness, Interpretabiity and Deployment

Abstract: We consider training machine learning models that are fair in the sense that their performance is invariant under certain sensitive perturbations to the inputs. For example, the performance of a resume screening system should be invariant under changes to the gender and/or ethnicity of the applicant. We formalize this notion of algorithmic fairness as a variant of individual fairness and develop a distributionally robust optimization approach to enforce it during training. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on two ML tasks that are susceptible to gender and racial biases.

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