A Unified Framework for Fair Graph Generation: Theoretical Guarantees and Empirical Advances

Zichong Wang, Zhipeng Yin, Wenbin Zhang

Keywords: Fairness, Graph Generation, GNN

Abstract: Graph generation models play pivotal roles in many real-world applications, from data augmentation to privacy-preserving. Despite their deployment successes, existing approaches often exhibit fairness issues, limiting their adoption in high-risk decision-making applications. Most existing fair graph generation works are based on autoregressive models that suffer from ordering sensitivity, while primarily addressing structural bias and overlooking the critical issue of feature bias. To this end, we propose FairGEM, a novel one-shot graph generation framework designed to mitigate both graph structural bias and node feature bias simultaneously. Furthermore, our theoretical analysis establishes that FairGEM delivers substantially stronger fairness guarantees than existing models while preserving generation quality. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that FairGEM achieves superior performance in both generation quality and fairness.

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

Submission Number: 18245