Federated Fairness without Access to Demographics

Afroditi Papadaki, Natalia Martinez, Martin Andres Bertran, Guillermo Sapiro, Miguel R. D. Rodrigues

Keywords: fairness, fairness in federated learning

Abstract: Existing federated learning approaches address demographic group fairness assuming that clients are aware of the sensitive groups. Such approaches are not applicable in settings where sensitive groups are unidentified or unavailable. In this paper, we address this limitation by focusing on federated learning settings of fairness without demographics. We present a novel objective that allows trade-offs between (worst-case) group fairness and average utility performance through a hyper-parameter and a group size constraint. We show that the proposed objective recovers existing approaches as special cases and then provide an algorithm to efficiently solve the proposed optimization problem. We experimentally showcase the different solutions that can be achieved by our proposed approach and compare it against baselines on various standard datasets.

Is Student: Yes