Papers › FairGAN: GANs-based Fairness-aware Learning for Recommendations with Implicit Feedback

FairGAN: GANs-based Fairness-aware Learning for Recommendations with Implicit Feedback

25 Apr 2022Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022 4archive 2025-07-28

Jie Li, Yongli Ren, Ke Deng

Ranking algorithms in recommender systems influence people to make decisions. Conventional ranking algorithms based on implicit feedback data aim to maximize the utility to users by capturing users’ preferences over items. However, these utility-focused algorithms tend to cause fairness issues that require careful consideration in online platforms. Existing fairness-focused studies does not explicitly consider the problem of lacking negative feedback in implicit feedback data, while previous utility-focused methods ignore the importance of fairness in recommendations. To fill this gap, we propose a Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based learning algorithm FairGAN mapping the exposure fairness issue to the problem of negative preferences in implicit feedback data. FairGAN does not explicitly treat unobserved interactions as negative, but instead, adopts a novel fairness-aware learning strategy to dynamically generate fairness signals. This optimizes the search direction to make FairGAN capable of searching the space of the optimal ranking that can fairly allocate exposure to individual items while preserving users’ utilities as high as possible.

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Exposure FairnessFairnessRecommendation Systems

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WGAN GP

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