Most fair machine learning methods either highly rely on the sensitive information of the training samples or require a large modification on the target models, which hinders their practical application. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage training algorithm named FAIRIF. It minimizes the loss over the reweighted data set (second stage) where the sample weights are computed to balance the model performance across different demographic groups (first stage). FAIRIF can be applied on a wide range of models trained by stochastic gradient descent without changing the model, while only requiring group annotations on a small validation set to compute sample weights. Theoretically, we show that, in the classification setting, three notions of disparity among different groups can be mitigated by training with the weights. Experiments on synthetic data sets demonstrate that FAIRIF yields models with better fairness-utility trade-offs against various types of bias; and on real-world data sets, we show the effectiveness and scalability of FAIRIF. Moreover, as evidenced by the experiments with pretrained models, FAIRIF is able to alleviate the unfairness issue of pretrained models without hurting their performance.

我们提出了一个名为FAIRIF的两阶段训练算法，它可以应用于一系列使用随机梯度下降训练的模型，并通过在小型验证集上计算样本权重来实现跨不同人口群体的模型性能平衡，从而缓解先前机器学习算法中存在的不公平问题。在合成数据集和实际数据集上的实验表明，FAIRIF可以在牺牲很少的模型实用性的情况下实现更好的公平性-实用性权衡。

通过平衡影响训练公平的深度神经网络