{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/simultaneously-achieving-group-exposure","title":"Simultaneously Achieving Group Exposure Fairness and Within-Group Meritocracy in Stochastic Bandits","arxiv_id":"2402.05575","date":"2024-02-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Subham Pokhriyal","Shweta Jain","Ganesh Ghalme","Swapnil Dhamal","Sujit Gujar"],"abstract":"Existing approaches to fairness in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) primarily focus on exposure guarantee to individual arms. When arms are naturally grouped by certain attribute(s), we propose Bi-Level Fairness, which considers two levels of fairness. At the first level, Bi-Level Fairness guarantees a certain minimum exposure to each group. To address the unbalanced allocation of pulls to individual arms within a group, we consider meritocratic fairness at the second level, which ensures that each arm is pulled according to its merit within the group. Our work shows that we can adapt a UCB-based algorithm to achieve a Bi-Level Fairness by providing (i) anytime Group Exposure Fairness guarantees and (ii) ensuring individual-level Meritocratic Fairness within each group. We first show that one can decompose regret bounds into two components: (a) regret due to anytime group exposure fairness and (b) regret due to meritocratic fairness within each group. Our proposed algorithm BF-UCB balances these two regrets optimally to achieve the upper bound of $O(\\sqrt{T})$ on regret; $T$ being the stopping time. With the help of simulated experiments, we further show that BF-UCB achieves sub-linear regret; provides better group and individual exposure guarantees compared to existing algorithms; and does not result in a significant drop in reward with respect to UCB algorithm, which does not impose any fairness constraint.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05575v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.05575v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"simultaneously-achieving-group-exposure","repo_url":"https://github.com/multifair-bandits/stochastic_fair_bandits","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"},{"task_slug":"exposure-fairness","task_name":"Exposure Fairness"},{"task_slug":"fairness","task_name":"Fairness"},{"task_slug":"multi-armed-bandits","task_name":"Multi-Armed Bandits"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}