FedFACT: A Provable Framework for Controllable Group-Fairness Calibration in Federated Learning

Li Zhang, Zhongxuan Han, XiaoHua Feng, Jiaming Zhang, Yuyuan Li, Chaochao Chen

Keywords: Federated Learning; Fairness; Multi-Class Classification

TL;DR: A controllable federated group-fairness calibration framework that achieves global and local fairness in multi-class classification with theoretical guarantees.

Abstract:

With emerging application of Federated Learning (FL) in decision-making scenarios, it is imperative to regulate model fairness to prevent disparities across sensitive groups (e.g., female, male).
Current research predominantly focuses on two concepts of group fairness within FL: *Global Fairness* (overall model disparity across all clients) and *Local Fairness* (the disparity within each client).
However, the non-decomposable, non-differentiable nature of fairness criteria pose two fundamental, unresolved challenges for fair FL: (i) *Harmonizing global and local fairness, especially in multi-class classification*; (ii) *Enabling a controllable, optimal accuracy-fairness trade-off*.
To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel controllable federated group-fairness calibration framework, named FedFACT.
FedFACT identifies the Bayes-optimal classifiers under both global and local fairness constraints in multi-class case, yielding models with minimal performance decline while guaranteeing fairness.
To effectively realize an adjustable, optimal accuracy-fairness balance, we derive specific characterizations of the Bayes-optimal fair classifiers for reformulating fair FL as personalized cost-sensitive learning problem for in-processing, and bi-level optimization for post-processing.
Theoretically, we provide convergence and generalization guarantees for FedFACT to approach the near-optimal accuracy under given fairness levels.
Extensive experiments on multiple datasets across various data heterogeneity demonstrate that FedFACT consistently outperforms baselines in balancing accuracy and global-local fairness.

Primary Area: Social and economic aspects of machine learning (e.g., fairness, interpretability, human-AI interaction, privacy, safety, strategic behavior)

Submission Number: 28415