In critical machine learning applications, ensuring fairness is essential to avoid perpetuating social inequities. In this work, we address the challenges of reducing bias and improving accuracy in data-scarce environments, where the cost of collecting labeled data prohibits the use of large, labeled datasets. In such settings, active learning promises to maximize marginal accuracy gains of small amounts of labeled data. However, existing applications of active learning for fairness fail to deliver on this, typically requiring large labeled datasets, or failing to ensure the desired fairness tolerance is met on the population distribution. To address such limitations, we introduce an innovative active learning framework that combines an exploration procedure inspired by posterior sampling with a fair classification subroutine. We demonstrate that this framework performs effectively in very data-scarce regimes, maximizing accuracy while satisfying fairness constraints with high probability. We evaluate our proposed approach using well-established real-world benchmark datasets and compare it against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in producing fair models, and improvement over existing methods.

在数据稀缺环境中，通过结合后验采样和公平分类子程序的创新主动学习框架，我们有效地提高了模型准确性并满足公平约束，证明了该方法在最大限度利用少量标注数据时的有效性，并对已有方法进行了改进。

低数据环境下公正主动学习