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Poster
Post-processing for Individual Fairness
Felix Petersen · Debarghya Mukherjee · Yuekai Sun · Mikhail Yurochkin

Thu Dec 09 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @
in Poster Session 6 »

Post-processing in algorithmic fairness is a versatile approach for correcting bias in ML systems that are already used in production. The main appeal of post-processing is that it avoids expensive retraining. In this work, we propose general post-processing algorithms for individual fairness (IF). We consider a setting where the learner only has access to the predictions of the original model and a similarity graph between individuals, guiding the desired fairness constraints. We cast the IF post-processing problem as a graph smoothing problem corresponding to graph Laplacian regularization that preserves the desired "treat similar individuals similarly" interpretation. Our theoretical results demonstrate the connection of the new objective function to a local relaxation of the original individual fairness. Empirically, our post-processing algorithms correct individual biases in large-scale NLP models such as BERT, while preserving accuracy.

Keywords: Graph Learning · Fairness

Author Information

Felix Petersen (University of Konstanz)
Debarghya Mukherjee (University of Michigan)
Yuekai Sun (University of Michigan)
Mikhail Yurochkin (IBM Research, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab)

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