Most existing works on fairness assume the model has full access to
demographic information. However, there exist scenarios where demographic
information is partially available because a record was not maintained
throughout data collection or due to privacy reasons. This setting is known as
demographic scarce regime. Prior research have shown that training an attribute
classifier to replace the missing sensitive attributes (proxy) can still
improve fairness. However, the use of proxy-sensitive attributes worsens
fairness-accuracy trade-offs compared to true sensitive attributes. To address
this limitation, we propose a framework to build attribute classifiers that
achieve better fairness-accuracy trade-offs. Our method introduces uncertainty
awareness in the attribute classifier and enforces fairness on samples with
demographic information inferred with the lowest uncertainty. We show
empirically that enforcing fairness constraints on samples with uncertain
sensitive attributes is detrimental to fairness and accuracy. Our experiments
on two datasets showed that the proposed framework yields models with
significantly better fairness-accuracy trade-offs compared to classic attribute
classifiers. Surprisingly, our framework outperforms models trained with
constraints on the true sensitive attributes.

本研究通过引入不确定性感知，对可能存在不确定性的人口敏感属性样本实施公平性要求，并提出一种建立更好的公平性 - 准确性权衡的属性分类器框架，实验证明该框架相对于传统方法在两个数据集上都取得显著的公平性 - 准确性权衡表现优势，并且超过了对真实敏感属性进行约束训练的模型。