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Related papers: The Statistical Fairness-Accuracy Frontier

200 papers

Real-world applications of machine learning tools in high-stakes domains are often regulated to be fair, in the sense that the predicted target should satisfy some quantitative notion of parity with respect to a protected attribute.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Han Zhao , Geoffrey J. Gordon

One of the major concerns of targeting interventions on individuals in social welfare programs is discrimination: individualized treatments may induce disparities across sensitive attributes such as age, gender, or race. This paper…

Econometrics · Economics 2022-07-01 Davide Viviano , Jelena Bradic

In many machine learning settings there is an inherent tension between fairness and accuracy desiderata. How should one proceed in light of such trade-offs? In this work we introduce and study $\gamma$-disqualification, a new framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Guy N. Rothblum , Gal Yona

Current approaches to group fairness in federated learning assume the existence of predefined and labeled sensitive groups during training. However, due to factors ranging from emerging regulations to dynamics and location-dependency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Afroditi Papadaki , Natalia Martinez , Martin Bertran , Guillermo Sapiro , Miguel Rodrigues

It has been shown that dimension reduction methods such as PCA may be inherently prone to unfairness and treat data from different sensitive groups such as race, color, sex, etc., unfairly. In pursuit of fairness-enhancing dimensionality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Mohammad Mahdi Kamani , Farzin Haddadpour , Rana Forsati , Mehrdad Mahdavi

We consider social resource allocations that deliver an array of scarce supports to a diverse population. Such allocations pervade social service delivery, such as provision of homeless services, assignment of refugees to cities, among…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Tasfia Mashiat , Xavier Gitiaux , Huzefa Rangwala , Patrick J. Fowler , Sanmay Das

Motivated by a plethora of practical examples where bias is induced by automated-decision making algorithms, there has been strong recent interest in the design of fair algorithms. However, there is often a dichotomy between fairness and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-13 April Niu , Agnes Totschnig , Adrian Vetta

Group fairness, a class of fairness notions that measure how different groups of individuals are treated differently according to their protected attributes, has been shown to conflict with one another, often with a necessary cost in loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-08 Joon Sik Kim , Jiahao Chen , Ameet Talwalkar

In machine learning fairness, training models that minimize disparity across different sensitive groups often leads to diminished accuracy, a phenomenon known as the fairness-accuracy trade-off. The severity of this trade-off inherently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-12 Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Jean-Francois Ton , Yang Liu

Optimizing NLP models for fairness poses many challenges. Lack of differentiable fairness measures prevents gradient-based loss training or requires surrogate losses that diverge from the true metric of interest. In addition, competing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Soumyajit Gupta , Venelin Kovatchev , Anubrata Das , Maria De-Arteaga , Matthew Lease

Growing use of machine learning in policy and social impact settings have raised concerns for fairness implications, especially for racial minorities. These concerns have generated considerable interest among machine learning and artificial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Kit T. Rodolfa , Hemank Lamba , Rayid Ghani

When building classification systems with demographic fairness considerations, there are two objectives to satisfy: 1) maximizing utility for the specific task and 2) ensuring fairness w.r.t. a known demographic attribute. These objectives…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Sepehr Dehdashtian , Bashir Sadeghi , Vishnu Naresh Boddeti

Fine-tuning has become the standard practice for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. However, the impact on model robustness is not well understood. In this work, we characterize the robustness-accuracy trade-off in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Kunyang Li , Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand , Ryan Sheatsley , Blaine Hoak , Yohan Beugin , Eric Pauley , Patrick McDaniel

Complex statistical machine learning models are increasingly being used or considered for use in high-stakes decision-making pipelines in domains such as financial services, health care, criminal justice and human services. These models are…

Applications · Statistics 2017-07-04 Alexandra Chouldechova , Max G'Sell

The fairness-accuracy trade-off is a key challenge in NLP tasks. Current work focuses on finding a single "optimal" solution to balance the two objectives, which is limited considering the diverse solutions on the Pareto front. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Yongkang Du , Jieyu Zhao , Yijun Yang , Tianyi Zhou

Achieving fairness in text-to-image generation demands mitigating social biases without compromising visual fidelity, a challenge critical to responsible AI. Current fairness evaluation procedures for text-to-image models rely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Marco N. Bochernitsan , Rodrigo C. Barros , Lucas S. Kupssinskü

In multi-objective optimization, the set of optimal trade-offs -- the Pareto front -- often contains regions that are extremely steep or flat. The Pareto optimal points in these regions are typically of limited interest for decision-making,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-26 Markus Herrmann-Wicklmayr , Kathrin Flaßkamp

Algorithmic fairness research often assumes a tradeoff between fairness and accuracy. Yet this tradeoff may not be universal. We test this assumption in the context of U.S. property tax assessment - a setting in which the output of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Evelyn Smith , Emma Harvey , Christopher Berry , Jacob Goldin , Daniel E. Ho

In this paper, we study the prediction of a real-valued target, such as a risk score or recidivism rate, while guaranteeing a quantitative notion of fairness with respect to a protected attribute such as gender or race. We call this class…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Zhiwei Steven Wu

As algorithmic decision-making systems are becoming more pervasive, it is crucial to ensure such systems do not become mechanisms of unfair discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Moreover, due to the inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Mohammad Mahdi Kamani , Rana Forsati , James Z. Wang , Mehrdad Mahdavi