Fairness-Regularized Online Optimization with Switching Costs

Pengfei Li, Yuelin Han, Adam Wierman, Shaolei Ren

Keywords: Online optimization, long-term cost, health-informed decision making

Abstract: Fairness and action smoothness are two crucial considerations in many online optimization problems, but they have yet to be addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we study a new and challenging setting of fairness-regularized smoothed online convex optimization with switching costs. First, to highlight the fundamental challenges introduced by the long-term fairness regularizer evaluated based on the entire sequence of actions, we prove that even without switching costs, no online algorithms can possibly achieve a sublinear regret or finite competitive ratio compared to the offline optimal algorithm as the problem episode length $T$ increases. Then, we propose **FairOBD** (Fairness-regularized Online Balanced Descent), which reconciles the tension between minimizing the hitting cost, switching cost, and fairness cost. Concretely, **FairOBD** decomposes the long-term fairness cost into a sequence of online costs by introducing an auxiliary variable and then leverages the auxiliary variable to regularize the online actions for fair outcomes. Based on a new approach to account for switching costs, we prove that **FairOBD** offers a worst-case asymptotic competitive ratio against a novel benchmark---the optimal offline algorithm with parameterized constraints---by considering $T\to\infty$. Finally, we run trace-driven experiments of dynamic computing resource provisioning for socially responsible AI inference to empirically evaluate **FairOBD**, showing that **FairOBD** can effectively reduce the total fairness-regularized cost and better promote fair outcomes compared to existing baseline solutions.

Primary Area: Optimization (e.g., convex and non-convex, stochastic, robust)

Submission Number: 15343