Fair4Free: Generating High-fidelity Fair Synthetic Samples using Data-Free Distillation

Md Fahim Sikder, Daniel de Leng, Fredrik Heintz

Keywords: data fairness, fair generative models, knowledge distillation, latent space distillation, synthetic data, biased data

Abstract: This work presents Fair4Free, a novel generative model to generate synthetic fair data using data-free distillation in the latent space. Fair4Free can work on the situation when the data is private or inaccessible. In our approach, we first train a teacher model to create fair representation and then distil the knowledge to a student model (using a smaller architecture). The process of distilling the student model is data-free, i.e. the student model does not have access to the training dataset while distilling. After the distillation, we use the distilled model to generate fair synthetic samples. Our extensive experiments show that our synthetic samples outperform state-of-the-art models in all three criteria (fairness, utility and synthetic quality) with a performance increase of 5\% for fairness, 8\% for utility and 12\% in synthetic quality for both tabular and image datasets.

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

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Submission Number: 6131