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 fairness


Geometry of Relaxed Fair Regression: A Unified Framework for Aware and Unaware Settings

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Fairness-accuracy trade-offs are a central concern in the deployment of fairness-aware machine learning methods. When sensitive attributes are unavailable at inference time-the so called unawareness setting, principled methods for obtaining accurate predictions under relaxed fairness constraints are largely missing. In this work, we address this gap by formulating regression under a demographic parity penalty as an optimal transport problem. Our framework unifies both the \emph{aware} and \emph{unaware} settings and characterizes optimal prediction functions via optimal transport maps, under both squared Wasserstein-2 and Total Variation penalties. These results reveal that the choice of penalty reflects fundamentally different fairness philosophies: the Wasserstein penalty induces a smooth, population-wide compromise, while Total Variation enforces exact parity for a subset of individuals. Building on these theoretical characterizations, we propose an algorithm that is simple to implement, computationally efficient, and consistently matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on real-world benchmarks.


Counterfactually Fair Regression via Optimal Transport

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of learning a counterfactually fair regressor. We adopt a causal uncertainty view in which counterfactual fairness is defined with resampled noise. We focus on obtaining theoretical fairness guarantees for a new post-processing estimator. We begin by showing that counterfactual fairness is equivalent to satisfying demographic parity conditional on the latent variable. This allows us to provide a closed-form expression of the optimal fair regressor via a barycentric quantile map. In order to handle continuous latent variables, we propose a discretized post-processing method. Then, under mild regularity assumptions, we prove high-probability finite-sample fairness guarantees for our estimator, providing an unfairness decay at rate $\tilde O(n^{-1/3})$, and establishing a matching risk bound of order $\tilde O(n^{-1/3})$. We provide a matching lower bound on the excess risk of almost fair predictions. Finally, we extend our results to the setting of relaxed counterfactual fairness. We validate our approach on real-world and synthetic data.


Operationalizing Individual Fairness via Gradient Descent and Bradley-Terry Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Individual fairness, the notion that "similar individuals should be treated similarly," provides a strong and flexible fairness guarantee for algorithmic decision makers. However, a barrier to implementing individual fairness in practice is the difficulty of learning the similarity metric over individuals. In this work, we present an algorithm for learning a Mahalanobis similarity metric from triplet queries of the form "is individual $i$ more similar to individual $j$ or $k$?" We work in the standard Bradley-Terry model for pairwise comparisons. Our algorithm consists of a spectral initialization step followed by gradient descent. We provide extensive theoretical guarantees on our algorithm, showing that it converges quickly to the ground truth metric despite the non-convexity of the loss in our model. Because our focus is on fairness, we also show that individual fairness with respect to an estimated metric is sufficient to achieve similar fairness with respect to the true metric. We also discuss potential applications of our work to AI model tuning. Finally, we present experimental results that demonstrate the convergence of our algorithm and the fairness performance of downstream fair predictors trained on our estimated metric.


Causal Bias Detection in Generative Artificial Intelligence

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Automated systems built on artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly deployed across high-stakes domains, raising critical concerns about fairness and the perpetuation of demographic disparities that exist in the world. In this context, causal inference provides a principled framework for reasoning about fairness, as it links observed disparities to underlying mechanisms and aligns naturally with human intuition and legal notions of discrimination. Prior work on causal fairness primarily focuses on the standard machine learning setting, where a decision-maker constructs a single predictive mechanism $f_{\widehat Y}$ for an outcome variable $Y$, while inheriting the causal mechanisms of all other covariates from the real world. The generative AI setting, however, is markedly more complex: generative models can sample from arbitrary conditionals over any set of variables, implicitly constructing their own beliefs about all causal mechanisms rather than learning a single predictive function. This fundamental difference requires new developments in causal fairness methodology. We formalize the problem of causal fairness in generative AI and unify it with the standard ML setting under a common theoretical framework. We then derive new causal decomposition results that enable granular quantification of fairness impacts along both (a) different causal pathways and (b) the replacement of real-world mechanisms by the generative model's mechanisms. We establish identification conditions and introduce efficient estimators for causal quantities of interest, and demonstrate the value of our methodology by analyzing race and gender bias in large language models across different datasets.


Causal Fairness for Survival Analysis

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In the data-driven era, large-scale datasets are routinely collected and analyzed using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to inform decisions in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, employment, and criminal justice, raising concerns about the fairness behavior of these systems. Existing works in fair ML cover tasks such as bias detection, fair prediction, and fair decision-making, but largely focus on static settings. At the same time, fairness in temporal contexts, particularly survival/time-to-event (TTE) analysis, remains relatively underexplored, with current approaches to fair survival analysis adopting statistical fairness definitions, which, even with unlimited data, cannot disentangle the causal mechanisms that generate disparities. To address this gap, we develop a causal framework for fairness in TTE analysis, enabling the decomposition of disparities in survival into contributions from direct, indirect, and spurious pathways. This provides a human-understandable explanation of why disparities arise and how they evolve over time. Our non-parametric approach proceeds in four steps: (1) formalizing the necessary assumptions about censoring and lack of confounding using a graphical model; (2) recovering the conditional survival function given covariates; (3) applying the Causal Reduction Theorem to reframe the problem in a form amenable to causal pathway decomposition; (4) estimating the effects efficiently. Finally, our approach is used to analyze the temporal evolution of racial disparities in outcome after admission to an intensive care unit (ICU).


Olympic gold medalists rip Newsom for California's trans athlete situation ahead of protested track meet

FOX News

Another LIV golfer remains committed to staying put: 'I have full faith in the future of LIV' Megan Rapinoe, in a shock to no one, backs Angel Reese skipping interviews as'taking power back' White House calls out Newsom as California girls' track and field controversy reignites Here's why the coaches association's 24-team College Football Playoff could ruin the sport Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown tells ESPN's Stephen A Smith to'be quiet and retire' President Trump on $1,000 World Cup ticket prices: 'I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest' Pirates vs. Diamondbacks betting preview targets the under as both offenses go cold in series Former LSU coach Brian Kelly uses AI to prepare for job interviews, proving he's just like the rest of us Political violence should'never be normalized': Former California GOP chairwoman UAE says air defenses are active after US conducts'self-defense' strikes in Iran Bob Lazar said S4 was the'most unpleasant place' to be, documentary director recalls Former U.S. attorney explains why he thinks Tyler Robinson's defense team is playing the long game Greg Gutfeld: Dems can't admit they have a problem Mark Hamill is a'miserable human being': Sage Steele AOC is in'favor' of'robbing' the American people: Tiffany Smiley Iran's playbook is to talk and then fight, Lt Gen Keith Kellogg says Watters: If Iran doesn't sign this fast, the US will be a lot more violent OutKick Olympic gold medalists rip Newsom for California's trans athlete situation ahead of protested track meet California girls' track and field student-athletes protest trans inclusion ahead of state meet California high school student-athletes Olivia Viola and Reese Hogan speak at a rally ahead of a major track and field event to oppose trans athletes in their sports. Three-time Olympic women's gold medalists Nancy Hogshead and Kaillie Humphries have spoken out on the growing girls' track and field controversy in California, as a trans athlete is looking to defend a pair of state titles. Hogshead spoke out against California Gov. Gavin Newsom for his state's policies that continue to allow trans athletes in women's sports. The medalist responded to a statement from a source within Newsom's office on the issue that stated, The Governor has said discussions on this issue should be guided by fairness, dignity, and respect. Governor Newsom seems to exclude girls from his own standard of'fairness, dignity and respect.'


Tuning Derivatives for Causal Fairness in Machine Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Artificial-intelligence systems are becoming ubiquitous in society, yet their predictions typically inherit biases with respect to protected attributes such as race, gender, or age. Classical fairness notions, most notably Statistical Parity (SP), demand that predictions be independent of the protected attributes, but are overly restrictive when these attributes influence mediating variables that are considered business necessities. Recent causal formulations relax SP by distinguishing allowed from not-allowed causal paths and by complementing SP with Predictive Parity (PP), requiring the predictor to replicate the legitimate influence of business-necessities. Existing path-based definitions are mainly practical when applied to categorical attributes. This paper introduces a new framework for fairness in structural causal models that is tailored to continuous protected attributes. We formalize SP and PP through path-specific partial derivatives, establish conditions under which these criteria coincide with prior causal definitions, and characterize when a fair predictor, one that satisfies SP along not-allowed paths while achieving PP along allowed paths, exists. Building on this theory, we propose a fair tuning algorithm that either constructs such a predictor or, when not possible, allows for a trade-off between SP and PP. We present experiments on simulated and real data to evaluate our proposal, compare it with previously proposed methods, and show that it performs better when PP is considered.


White House calls out Newsom as California girls' track and field controversy reignites

FOX News

Megan Rapinoe, in a shock to no one, backs Angel Reese skipping interviews as'taking power back' Here's why the coaches association's 24-team College Football Playoff could ruin the sport Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown tells ESPN's Stephen A Smith to'be quiet and retire' President Trump on $1,000 World Cup ticket prices: 'I wouldn't pay it either, to be honest' Pirates vs. Diamondbacks betting preview targets the under as both offenses go cold in series Former LSU coach Brian Kelly uses AI to prepare for job interviews, proving he's just like the rest of us Newsom office source responds to planned protest against trans athlete at state playoff girls' track meet US waits for Iran's response on peace proposal Authorities try to'connect the dots' on hantavirus infections Jesse Watters: Spencer Pratt is a'charismatic, common-sense populist' Greg Gutfeld: Dana White laughs off the'toxic masculinity thing' Iranians are fearful of facing the regime's frustration and anger after the war, activist says OutKick White House calls out Newsom as California girls' track and field controversy reignites Spokeswoman called Newsom'a truly sick individual who has no regard for fairness, dignity, and respect' Jurupa Valley High School graduate Hadeel Hazameh responded to the news that the Trump administration has launched a Title IX investigation into her district over an incident involving trans volleyball teammate, which has resulted in her graduating early and leaving her sports career behind. President Donald Trump's White House has officially put California Gov. Gavin Newsom on notice as a controversial girls' track and field postseason is set to begin this weekend. A White House spokesperson called out Newsom in a statement to Fox News Digital as his state continues to allow biological male trans athletes to compete in girls' high school sports. Gavin Newscum is a truly sick individual who has no regard for fairness, dignity, and respect. If he did, he wouldn't allow men to compete in women's sports, limiting women's opportunities and jeopardizing their health and safety.