FFB: A Fair Fairness Benchmark for In-Processing Group Fairness Methods
This work addresses the challenge of comparing and developing fairness methods for researchers in the fairness community, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tools.
The paper tackles the problem of inconsistent and inaccessible benchmarking for in-processing group fairness methods by introducing the Fair Fairness Benchmark (FFB), an open-source framework that standardized evaluation and conducted 45,079 experiments using 14,428 GPU hours.
This paper introduces the Fair Fairness Benchmark (\textsf{FFB}), a benchmarking framework for in-processing group fairness methods. Ensuring fairness in machine learning is important for ethical compliance. However, there exist challenges in comparing and developing fairness methods due to inconsistencies in experimental settings, lack of accessible algorithmic implementations, and limited extensibility of current fairness packages and tools. To address these issues, we introduce an open-source standardized benchmark for evaluating in-processing group fairness methods and provide a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art methods to ensure different notions of group fairness. This work offers the following key contributions: the provision of flexible, extensible, minimalistic, and research-oriented open-source code; the establishment of unified fairness method benchmarking pipelines; and extensive benchmarking, which yields key insights from $\mathbf{45,079}$ experiments, $\mathbf{14,428}$ GPU hours. We believe that our work will significantly facilitate the growth and development of the fairness research community.