FairGrad: Fairness Aware Gradient Descent
It addresses fairness in machine learning for practical applications, but appears incremental as it builds on existing re-weighting schemes.
The paper tackles group fairness in classification by proposing FairGrad, a re-weighting method that learns group-specific weights to enforce fairness, and shows it is competitive with standard baselines across various datasets.
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 which reduces their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose FairGrad, a method to enforce fairness based on a re-weighting scheme that iteratively learns group specific weights based on whether they are advantaged or not. FairGrad is easy to implement, accommodates various standard fairness definitions, and comes with minimal overhead. Furthermore, we show that it is competitive with standard baselines over various datasets including ones used in natural language processing and computer vision. FairGrad is available as a PyPI package at - https://pypi.org/project/fairgrad