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Double Fairness Policy Learning: Integrating Action Fairness and Outcome Fairness in Decision-making

Bian, Zeyu, Wang, Lan, Shi, Chengchun, Qi, Zhengling

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Fairness is a central pillar of trustworthy machine learning, especially in domains where accuracy- or profit-driven optimization is insufficient. While most fairness research focuses on supervised learning, fairness in policy learning remains less explored. Because policy learning is interventional, it induces two distinct fairness targets: action fairness (equitable action assignments) and outcome fairness (equitable downstream consequences). Crucially, equalizing actions does not generally equalize outcomes when groups face different constraints or respond differently to the same action. We propose a novel double fairness learning (DFL) framework that explicitly manages the trade-off among three objectives: action fairness, outcome fairness, and value maximization. We integrate fairness directly into a multi-objective optimization problem for policy learning and employ a lexicographic weighted Tchebyshev method that recovers Pareto solutions beyond convex settings, with theoretical guarantees on the regret bounds. Our framework is flexible and accommodates various commonly used fairness notions. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved performance relative to competing methods. In applications to a motor third-party liability insurance dataset and an entrepreneurship training dataset, DFL substantially improves both action and outcome fairness while incurring only a modest reduction in overall value.


Fairness-informed Pareto Optimization : An Efficient Bilevel Framework

Tanji, Sofiane, Vaiter, Samuel, Laguel, Yassine

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Despite their promise, fair machine learning methods often yield Pareto-inefficient models, in which the performance of certain groups can be improved without degrading that of others. This issue arises frequently in traditional in-processing approaches such as fairness-through-regularization. In contrast, existing Pareto-efficient approaches are biased towards a certain perspective on fairness and fail to adapt to the broad range of fairness metrics studied in the literature. In this paper, we present BADR, a simple framework to recover the optimal Pareto-efficient model for any fairness metric. Our framework recovers its models through a Bilevel Adaptive Rescalarisation procedure. The lower level is a weighted empirical risk minimization task where the weights are a convex combination of the groups, while the upper level optimizes the chosen fairness objective. We equip our framework with two novel large-scale, single-loop algorithms, BADR-GD and BADR-SGD, and establish their convergence guarantees. We release badr, an open-source Python toolbox implementing our framework for a variety of learning tasks and fairness metrics. Finally, we conduct extensive numerical experiments demonstrating the advantages of BADR over existing Pareto-efficient approaches to fairness.