Rethinking Pareto Frontier: On the Optimal Trade-offs in Fair Classification

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19714 Authors

Keywords: fairness-accuracy tradeoff

Abstract: Fairness has become an arising concern in machine learning with its prevalence in decision-making processes, and the trade-offs between various fairness notions and between fairness and accuracy has been empirically observed. However, the inheritance of such trade-offs, as well as the quantification of the best achievable trade-offs, i.e., the Pareto optimal trade-offs, under varied constraints on fairness notions has been rarely and improperly discussed. Owing to the sub-optimality of fairness interventions, existing work fails to provide informative characterization regarding these trade-offs. In light of existing limitations, in this work, we propose a reformulation of the model-specific (MS) Pareto optimal trade-off, where we frame it as convex optimization problems involving fairness notions and accuracy w.r.t. the confusion vector. Our formulation provides an efficient approximation of the best achievable accuracy under dynamic fairness constraints, and yields systematical analysis regarding the fairness-accuracy trade-off. Going beyond the discussion on fairness-accuracy trade-offs, we extend the discussion to the trade-off between fairness notions, which characterizes the impact of accuracy on the compatibility between fairness notions. Inspired by our reformulation, we propose a last-layer retraining framework with group-dependent bias, and we prove theoretically the superiority of our method over existing baselines. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in achieving better fairness-accuracy trade-off, and that our MS Pareto frontiers sufficiently quantify the two trade-offs.

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

Submission Number: 19714