FairGrad: Fairness Aware Gradient Descent

Gaurav Maheshwari, Michaël Perrot

Keywords: Group Fairness, Optimization

TL;DR: A method to enforce fairness based on a reweighting scheme that iteratively learns group specific weights based on whether they are advantaged or not.

Abstract: We address the problem of group fairness in classification, where the objective is to learn models that do not unjustly discriminate against subgroups of the population. Most existing approaches are limited to simple binary tasks or involve difficult to implement training mechanisms. This reduces their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose FairGrad, a method to enforce fairness based on a reweighting scheme that iteratively learns group specific weights based on whether they are advantaged or not. FairGrad is easy to implement and can accommodate various standard fairness definitions. Furthermore, we show that it is competitive with standard baselines over various datasets including ones used in natural language processing and computer vision.

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Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/fairgrad-fairness-aware-gradient-descent/code)