Promoting fairness for deep clustering models in unsupervised clustering settings to reduce demographic bias is a challenging goal. This is because of the limitation of large-scale balanced data with well-annotated labels for sensitive or protected attributes. In this paper, we first evaluate demographic bias in deep clustering models from the perspective of cluster purity, which is measured by the ratio of positive samples within a cluster to their correlation degree. This measurement is adopted as an indication of demographic bias. Then, a novel loss function is introduced to encourage a purity consistency for all clusters to maintain the fairness aspect of the learned clustering model. Moreover, we present a novel attention mechanism, Cross-attention, to measure correlations between multiple clusters, strengthening faraway positive samples and improving the purity of clusters during the learning process. Experimental results on a large-scale dataset with numerous attribute settings have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach on both clustering accuracy and fairness enhancement on several sensitive attributes.

本文提出了一种新的损失函数和注意力机制，以促进聚类模型的公平性和减少人口统计学偏差，实验结果表明该方法在多个敏感属性上提高了聚类准确性和公平性。

可视化聚类中的公平性：一种新型Transformer聚类方法