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Poster
Online Learning with an Unknown Fairness Metric
Stephen Gillen · Christopher Jung · Michael Kearns · Aaron Roth

Wed Dec 05 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Room 210 #91
in Wed Poster Session B »

We consider the problem of online learning in the linear contextual bandits setting, but in which there are also strong individual fairness constraints governed by an unknown similarity metric. These constraints demand that we select similar actions or individuals with approximately equal probability DHPRZ12, which may be at odds with optimizing reward, thus modeling settings where profit and social policy are in tension. We assume we learn about an unknown Mahalanobis similarity metric from only weak feedback that identifies fairness violations, but does not quantify their extent. This is intended to represent the interventions of a regulator who "knows unfairness when he sees it" but nevertheless cannot enunciate a quantitative fairness metric over individuals. Our main result is an algorithm in the adversarial context setting that has a number of fairness violations that depends only logarithmically on T, while obtaining an optimal O(sqrt(T)) regret bound to the best fair policy.

Keywords: Bandit Algorithms · Online Learning · Similarity and Distance Learning · Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · Metric Learning
[ Paper] 

Author Information

Stephen Gillen (University of Pennsylvania)
Christopher Jung (University of Pennsylvania)
Michael Kearns (University of Pennsylvania)

Michael Kearns is Professor and National Center Chair in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include topics in machine learning, algorithmic game theory, social networks, and computational finance. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he spent a decade at AT&T/Bell Labs, where he was head of AI Research. He is co-director of Penn’s Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences (warrencenter.upenn.edu), and founder of Penn’s Networked and Social Systems Engineering (NETS) undergraduate program (www.nets.upenn.edu). Kearns consults extensively in technology and finance, and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania)

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