As the data-driven decision process becomes dominating for industrial applications, fairness-aware machine learning arouses great attention in various areas. This work proposes fairness penalties learned by neural networks with a simple random sampler of sensitive attributes for non-discriminatory supervised learning. In contrast to many existing works that critically rely on the discreteness of sensitive attributes and response variables, the proposed penalty is able to handle versatile formats of the sensitive attributes, so it is more extensively applicable in practice than many existing algorithms. This penalty enables us to build a computationally efficient group-level in-processing fairness-aware training framework. Empirical evidence shows that our framework enjoys better utility and fairness measures on popular benchmark data sets than competing methods. We also theoretically characterize estimation errors and loss of utility of the proposed neural-penalized risk minimization problem.

利用神经网络以简单的随机采样器对敏感属性进行学习的公平惩罚措施，旨在实现非歧视性监督学习。与现有的许多方法相比，该惩罚能够处理多种格式的敏感属性，因此在实践中更具广泛适用性。实证证据表明，我们的框架在流行的基准数据集上的效用和公平性度量优于竞争方法。我们还在理论上表征了所提出的神经网络惩罚风险最小化问题的估计误差和效用损失。

以简单随机抽样器进行敏感属性的公平监督学习