Most of existing work on fairness assumes available demographic information in the training set. In practice, due to legal or privacy concerns, when demographic information is not available in the training set, it is crucial to find alternative objectives to ensure fairness. Existing work on fairness without demographics follows Rawlsian Max-Min fairness objectives. However, such constraints could be too strict to improve group fairness, and could lead to a great decrease in accuracy. In light of these limitations, in this paper, we propose to solve the problem from a new perspective, i.e., through knowledge distillation. Our method uses soft label from an overfitted teacher model as an alternative, and we show from preliminary experiments that soft labelling is beneficial for improving fairness. We analyze theoretically the fairness of our method, and we show that our method can be treated as an error-based reweighing. Experimental results on three datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives, with notable improvements in group fairness and with relatively small decrease in accuracy.

Much of the previous machine learning (ML) fairness literature assumes that protected features such as race and sex are present in the dataset, and relies upon them to mitigate fairness concerns. However, in practice factors like privacy and regulation often preclude the collection of protected features, or their use for training or inference, severely limiting the applicability of traditional fairness research. Therefore, we ask: How can we train a ML model to improve fairness when we do not even know the protected group memberships? In this work we address this problem by proposing Adversarially Reweighted Learning (ARL). In particular, we hypothesize that non-protected features and task labels are valuable for identifying fairness issues, and can be used to co-train an adversarial reweighting approach for improving fairness. Our results show that ARL improves Rawlsian Max-Min fairness, with notable AUC improvements for worst-case protected groups in multiple datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art alternatives.