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Fair Meta-Learning: Learning How to Learn Fairly

Machine Learning 2019-11-12 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Data sets for fairness relevant tasks can lack examples or be biased according to a specific label in a sensitive attribute. We demonstrate the usefulness of weight based meta-learning approaches in such situations. For models that can be trained through gradient descent, we demonstrate that there are some parameter configurations that allow models to be optimized from a few number of gradient steps and with minimal data which are both fair and accurate. To learn such weight sets, we adapt the popular MAML algorithm to Fair-MAML by the inclusion of a fairness regularization term. In practice, Fair-MAML allows practitioners to train fair machine learning models from only a few examples when data from related tasks is available. We empirically exhibit the value of this technique by comparing to relevant baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.04336,
  title  = {Fair Meta-Learning: Learning How to Learn Fairly},
  author = {Dylan Slack and Sorelle Friedler and Emile Givental},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.04336},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.09092

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:11:49.096Z