Towards counterfactual fairness through auxiliary variables

Bowei Tian, Ziyao Wang, Shwai He, Wanghao Ye, Guoheng Sun, Yucong Dai, Yongkai Wu, Ang Li

Keywords: Counterfactual, Fairness, Auxiliary variables

TL;DR: We introduce EXOC, a causal model framework that achieves counterfactual fairness without sacrificing accuracy.

Abstract:

The challenge of balancing fairness and predictive accuracy in machine learning models, especially when sensitive attributes such as race, gender, or age are considered, has motivated substantial research in recent years. Counterfactual fairness ensures that predictions remain consistent across counterfactual variations of sensitive attributes, which is a crucial concept in addressing societal biases.
However, existing counterfactual fairness approaches usually overlook intrinsic information about sensitive features, limiting their ability to achieve fairness while simultaneously maintaining performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce EXOgenous Causal reasoning (EXOC), a novel causal reasoning framework motivated by exogenous variables. It leverages auxiliary variables to uncover intrinsic properties that give rise to sensitive attributes. Our framework explicitly defines an auxiliary node and a control node that contribute to counterfactual fairness and control the information flow within the model. Our evaluation, conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets, validates EXOC's superiority, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in achieving counterfactual fairness without sacrificing accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/counterfactual_fairness_2025.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

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Submission Number: 8141