As responsible AI gains importance in machine learning algorithms, properties such as fairness, adversarial robustness, and causality have received considerable attention in recent years. However, despite their individual significance, there remains a critical gap in simultaneously exploring and integrating these properties. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that examines the relationship between individual fairness, adversarial robustness, and structural causal models in heterogeneous data spaces, particularly when dealing with discrete sensitive attributes. We use causal structural models and sensitive attributes to create a fair metric and apply it to measure semantic similarity among individuals. By introducing a novel causal adversarial perturbation and applying adversarial training, we create a new regularizer that combines individual fairness, causality, and robustness in the classifier. Our method is evaluated on both real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving an accurate classifier that simultaneously exhibits fairness, adversarial robustness, and causal awareness.

In the past few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has garnered attention from various industries including financial services (FS). AI has made a positive impact in financial services by enhancing productivity and improving risk management. While AI can offer efficient solutions, it has the potential to bring unintended consequences. One such consequence is the pronounced effect of AI-related unfairness and attendant fairness-related harms. These fairness-related harms could involve differential treatment of individuals; for example, unfairly denying a loan to certain individuals or groups of individuals. In this paper, we focus on identifying and mitigating individual unfairness and leveraging some of the recently published techniques in this domain, especially as applicable to the credit adjudication use case. We also investigate the extent to which techniques for achieving individual fairness are effective at achieving group fairness. Our main contribution in this work is functionalizing a two-step training process which involves learning a fair similarity metric from a group sense using a small portion of the raw data and training an individually "fair" classifier using the rest of the data where the sensitive features are excluded. The key characteristic of this two-step technique is related to its flexibility, i.e., the fair metric obtained in the first step can be used with any other individual fairness algorithms in the second step. Furthermore, we developed a second metric (distinct from the fair similarity metric) to determine how fairly a model is treating similar individuals. We use this metric to compare a "fair" model against its baseline model in terms of their individual fairness value. Finally, some experimental results corresponding to the individual unfairness mitigation techniques are presented.

Post-processing in algorithmic fairness is a versatile approach for correcting bias in ML systems that are already used in production. The main appeal of post-processing is that it avoids expensive retraining. In this work, we propose general post-processing algorithms for individual fairness (IF). We consider a setting where the learner only has access to the predictions of the original model and a similarity graph between individuals, guiding the desired fairness constraints. We cast the IF post-processing problem as a graph smoothing problem corresponding to graph Laplacian regularization that preserves the desired "treat similar individuals similarly" interpretation. Our theoretical results demonstrate the connection of the new objective function to a local relaxation of the original individual fairness. Empirically, our post-processing algorithms correct individual biases in large-scale NLP models such as BERT, while preserving accuracy.

As we rely on machine learning (ML) models to make more consequential decisions, the issue of ML models perpetuating or even exacerbating undesirable historical biases (e.g. In this paper, we focus on the problem of detecting violations of individual fairness in ML models. We formalize the problem as measuring the susceptibility of ML models against a form of adversarial attack and develop a suite of inference tools for the adversarial cost function. The tools allow auditors to assess the individual fairness of ML models in a statistically-principled way: form confidence intervals for the worst-case performance differential between similar individuals and test hypotheses of model fairness with (asymptotic) non-coverage/Type I error rate control. The problem of bias in machine learning systems is at the forefront of contemporary ML research. Numerous media outlets have scrutinized machine learning systems deployed in practice for violations of basic societal equality principles (Angwin et al., 2016; Dastin, 2018; Vigdor, 2019). In response researchers developed many formal definitions of algorithmic fairness along with algorithms for enforcing these definitions in ML models (Dwork et al., 2011; Hardt et al., 2016; Berk et al., 2017; Kusner et al., 2018; Ritov et al., 2017; Yurochkin et al., 2020). Despite the flurry of ML fairness research, the basic question of assessing fairness of a given ML model in a statistically principled way remains largely unexplored. In this paper we propose a statistically principled approach to assessing individual fairness (Dwork et al., 2011) of ML models.

We consider the task of enforcing individual fairness in gradient boosting. Gradient boosting is a popular method for machine learning from tabular data, which arise often in applications where algorithmic fairness is a concern. At a high level, our approach is a functional gradient descent on a (distributionally) robust loss function that encodes our intuition of algorithmic fairness for the ML task at hand. Unlike prior approaches to individual fairness that only work with smooth ML models, our approach also works with non-smooth models such as decision trees. We show that our algorithm converges globally and generalizes. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm on three ML problems susceptible to algorithmic bias.

We develop an algorithm to train individually fair learning-to-rank (LTR) models. The proposed approach ensures items from minority groups appear alongside similar items from majority groups. This notion of fair ranking is based on the definition of individual fairness from supervised learning and is more nuanced than prior fair LTR approaches that simply ensure the ranking model provides underrepresented items with a basic level of exposure. The crux of our method is an optimal transport-based regularizer that enforces individual fairness and an efficient algorithm for optimizing the regularizer. We show that our approach leads to certifiably individually fair LTR models and demonstrate the efficacy of our method on ranking tasks subject to demographic biases. Information retrieval (IR) systems are everywhere in today's digital world, and ranking models are integral parts of many IR systems. In light of their ubiquity, issues of algorithmic bias and unfairness in ranking models have come to the fore of the public's attention. In many applications, the items to be ranked are individuals, so algorithmic biases in the output of ranking models directly affect people's lives. For example, gender bias in job search engines directly affect the career success of job applicants (Dastin, 2018).

Individual fairness is an intuitive definition of algorithmic fairness that addresses some of the drawbacks of group fairness. Despite its benefits, it depends on a task specific fair metric that encodes our intuition of what is fair and unfair for the ML task at hand, and the lack of a widely accepted fair metric for many ML tasks is the main barrier to broader adoption of individual fairness. In this paper, we present two simple ways to learn fair metrics from a variety of data types. We show empirically that fair training with the learned metrics leads to improved fairness on three machine learning tasks susceptible to gender and racial biases. We also provide theoretical guarantees on the statistical performance of both approaches.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems permeate our world, the problem of implicit biases in these systems have become more serious. AI systems are routinely used to make decisions or support the decision-making process in credit, hiring, criminal justice, and education, all of which are domains protected by anti-discrimination law. Although AI systems appear to eliminate the biases of a human decision maker, they may perpetuate or even exacerbate biases in the training data [64]. Such biases are especially objectionable when it adversely affects underprivileged groups of users [3]. Although the most obvious remedy is to remove the biases in the training data, this is impractical in most applications.