English

Homophily-aware Supervised Contrastive Counterfactual Augmented Fair Graph Neural Network

Machine Learning 2026-04-06 v1

Abstract

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph representation learning. However, they remain susceptible to biases that can arise not only from node attributes but also from the graph structure itself. Addressing fairness in GNNs has therefore emerged as a critical research challenge. In this work, we propose a novel model for training fairness-aware GNNs by improving the counterfactual augmented fair graph neural network framework (CAF). Specifically, our approach introduces a two-phase training strategy: in the first phase, we edit the graph to increase homophily ratio with respect to class labels while reducing homophily ratio with respect to sensitive attribute labels; in the second phase, we integrate a modified supervised contrastive loss and environmental loss into the optimization process, enabling the model to jointly improve predictive performance and fairness. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms CAF and several state-of-the-art graph-based learning methods in both classification accuracy and fairness metrics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.02342,
  title  = {Homophily-aware Supervised Contrastive Counterfactual Augmented Fair Graph Neural Network},
  author = {Mahdi Tavassoli Kejani and Fadi Dornaika and Charlotte Laclau and Jean-Michel Loubes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.02342},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This paper has been accepted for publication at the IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning, 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:51:39.366Z