We consider the problem of learning representations that achieve group and subgroup fairness with respect to multiple sensitive attributes. Taking inspiration from the disentangled representation learning literature, we propose an algorithm for learning compact representations of datasets that are useful for reconstruction and prediction, but are also \emph{flexibly fair}, meaning they can be easily modified at test time to achieve subgroup demographic parity with respect to multiple sensitive attributes and their conjunctions. We show empirically that the resulting encoder---which does not require the sensitive attributes for inference---enables the adaptation of a single representation to a variety of fair classification tasks with new target labels and subgroup definitions.

How do we learn from biased data? Historical datasets often reflect historical prejudices; sensitive or protected attributes may affect the observed treatments and outcomes. Classification algorithms tasked with predicting outcomes accurately from these datasets tend to replicate these biases. We advocate a causal modeling approach to learning from biased data and reframe fair classification as an intervention problem. We propose a causal model in which the sensitive attribute confounds both the treatment and the outcome. Building on prior work in deep learning and generative modeling, we describe how to learn the parameters of this causal model from observational data alone, even in the presence of unobserved confounders. We show experimentally that fairness-aware causal modeling provides better estimates of the causal effects between the sensitive attribute, the treatment, and the outcome. We further present evidence that estimating these causal effects can help us to learn policies which are both more accurate and fair, when presented with a historically biased dataset.

In many high-stakes ML applications, there are multiple decision-makers involved, both automated and human. The interaction between these agents often goes unaddressed in algorithmic development. In this work, we explore a simple version of this interaction with a two-stage framework containing an automated model and an external decision-maker. The model can choose to say IDK, and pass the decision downstream, as explored in rejection learning. We extend this concept by proposing learning to defer, which generalizes the rejection learning framework by considering the effect of the other agents in the decision-making process. We propose a learning algorithm which accounts for potential biases held by external decision-makers in a system. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that learning to defer can make a system not only more accurate but also less biased. Even when operated by highly biased users, we show that deferring models can still greatly improve the fairness of the entire system.

In this work, we advocate for representation learning as the key to mitigating unfair prediction outcomes downstream. We envision a scenario where learned representations may be handed off to other entities with unknown objectives. We propose and explore adversarial representation learning as a natural method of ensuring those entities will act fairly, and connect group fairness (demographic parity, equalized odds, and equal opportunity) to different adversarial objectives. Through worst-case theoretical guarantees and experimental validation, we show that the choice of this objective is crucial to fair prediction. Furthermore, we present the first in-depth experimental demonstration of fair transfer learning, by showing that our learned representations admit fair predictions on new tasks while maintaining utility, an essential goal of fair representation learning.

Inference in Bayes Nets (BAYES) is an important problem with numerous applications in probabilistic reasoning. Counting the number of satisfying assignments of a propositional formula (#SAT) is a closely related problem of fundamental theoretical importance. Both these problems, and others, are members of the class of sum-of-products (SUMPROD) problems. In this paper we show that standard backtracking search when augmented with a simple memoization scheme (caching) can solve any sum-of-products problem with time complexity that is at least as good any other state-of-the-art exact algorithm, and that it can also achieve the best known time-space tradeoff. Furthermore, backtracking's ability to utilize more flexible variable orderings allows us to prove that it can achieve an exponential speedup over other standard algorithms for SUMPROD on some instances. The ideas presented here have been utilized in a number of solvers that have been applied to various types of sum-of-product problems. These system's have exploited the fact that backtracking can naturally exploit more of the problem's structure to achieve improved performance on a range of probleminstances. Empirical evidence of this performance gain has appeared in published works describing these solvers, and we provide references to these works.

Backtracking search is a powerful algorithmic paradigm that can be used to solve many problems. It is in a certain sense the dual of variable elimination; but on many problems, e.g., SAT, it is vastly superior to variable elimination in practice. Motivated by this we investigate the application of backtracking search to the problem of Bayesian inference (Bayes). We show that natural generalizations of known techniques allow backtracking search to achieve performance guarantees similar to standard algorithms for Bayes, and that there exist problems on which backtracking can in fact do much better. We also demonstrate that these ideas can be applied to implement a Bayesian inference engine whose performance is competitive with standard algorithms. Since backtracking search can very naturally take advantage of context specific structure, the potential exists for performance superior to standard algorithms on many problems.

Adaptive boosting methods are simple modular algorithms that operate as follows. Let 9: X -t Y be the function to be learned, where the label set Y is finite, typically binary-valued. The algorithm uses a learning procedure, which has access to n training examples, {(Xl, Y1),..., (xn, Yn)}, drawn randomly from X x Yaccording to distribution D; it outputs a hypothesis I:

Adaptive boosting methods are simple modular algorithms that operate as follows. Let 9: X -t Y be the function to be learned, where the label set Y is finite, typically binary-valued. The algorithm uses a learning procedure, which has access to n training examples, {(Xl, Y1),..., (xn, Yn)}, drawn randomly from X x Yaccording to distribution D; it outputs a hypothesis I:

Adaptive boosting methods are simple modular algorithms that operate as follows. Let 9: X -t Y be the function to be learned, where the label set Y is finite, typically binary-valued.The algorithm uses a learning procedure, which has access to n training examples, {(Xl, Y1), ..., (xn, Yn)}, drawn randomly from X x Yaccording todistribution D; it outputs a hypothesis I: