Papers › FairNN- Conjoint Learning of Fair Representations for Fair Decisions

FairNN- Conjoint Learning of Fair Representations for Fair Decisions

5 Apr 2020arXiv:2004.02173archive 2025-07-28

Tongxin Hu, Vasileios Iosifidis, Wentong Liao, Hang Zhang, Michael YingYang, Eirini Ntoutsi, Bodo Rosenhahn

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.

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ClassificationDecision MakingFairnessGeneral ClassificationRepresentation Learning

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