Chih-Cheng Rex Yuan

Chih-Cheng Rex Yuan, Bow-Yaw Wang

With the rapid advancement of AI, there is a growing trend to integrate AI into decision-making processes. However, AI systems may exhibit biases that lead decision-makers to draw unfair conclusions. Notably, the COMPAS system used in the American justice system to evaluate recidivism was found to favor racial majority groups; specifically, it violates a fairness standard called equalized odds. Various measures have been proposed to assess AI fairness. We present a framework for auditing AI fairness, involving third-party auditors and AI system providers, and we have created a tool to facilitate systematic examination of AI systems. The tool is open-sourced and publicly available. Unlike traditional AI systems, we advocate a transparent white-box and statistics-based approach. It can be utilized by third-party auditors, AI developers, or the general public for reference when judging the fairness criterion of AI systems.

Chih-Cheng Rex Yuan, Bow-Yaw Wang

Fairness auditing of AI systems can identify and quantify biases. However, traditional auditing using real-world data raises security and privacy concerns. It exposes auditors to security risks as they become custodians of sensitive information and targets for cyberattacks. Privacy risks arise even without direct breaches, as data analyses can inadvertently expose confidential information. To address these, we propose a framework that leverages differentially private synthetic data to audit the fairness of AI systems. By applying privacy-preserving mechanisms, it generates synthetic data that mirrors the statistical properties of the original dataset while ensuring privacy. This method balances the goal of rigorous fairness auditing and the need for strong privacy protections. Through experiments on real datasets like Adult, COMPAS, and Diabetes, we compare fairness metrics of synthetic and real data. By analyzing the alignment and discrepancies between these metrics, we assess the capacity of synthetic data to preserve the fairness properties of real data. Our results demonstrate the framework's ability to enable meaningful fairness evaluations while safeguarding sensitive information, proving its applicability across critical and sensitive domains.