fairness policy
Double Fairness Policy Learning: Integrating Action Fairness and Outcome Fairness in Decision-making
Bian, Zeyu, Wang, Lan, Shi, Chengchun, Qi, Zhengling
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.
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- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.04)
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- Health & Medicine (1.00)
- Banking & Finance > Insurance (1.00)
- Law (0.92)
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First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. The paper proposes a fairer optimization criterion, "regularized maximin", for centralized multi-agent MDPs. The idea, taken from the networking literature is elegant. The authors also propose an iterative optimization method that scales somewhat better than linear programming. The description of the transition model, lines 69-79, seems unnecessarily detailed.
Fairness in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making
We define a fairness solution criterion for multi-agent decision-making problems, where agents have local interests. This new criterion aims to maximize the worst performance of agents with a consideration on the overall performance. We develop a simple linear programming approach and a more scalable game-theoretic approach for computing an optimal fairness policy. This game-theoretic approach formulates this fairness optimization as a two-player zero-sum game and employs an iterative algorithm for finding a Nash equilibrium, corresponding to an optimal fairness policy.
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.14)
- Europe > Slovenia (0.04)
- Information Technology > Game Theory (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Optimization (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Agents > Agent Societies (0.49)
Fairness in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making
We define a fairness solution criterion for multi-agent decision-making problems, where agents have local interests. This new criterion aims to maximize the worst performance of agents with a consideration on the overall performance. We develop a simple linear programming approach and a more scalable game-theoretic approach for computing an optimal fairness policy. This game-theoretic approach formulates this fairness optimization as a two-player zero-sum game and employs an iterative algorithm for finding a Nash equilibrium, corresponding to an optimal fairness policy.
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.14)
- Europe > Slovenia (0.04)
- Information Technology > Game Theory (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Optimization (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Agents > Agent Societies (0.48)
Fairness in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making
We define a fairness solution criterion for multi-agent decision-making problems, where agents have local interests. This new criterion aims to maximize the worst performance of agents with a consideration on the overall performance. We develop a simple linear programming approach and a more scalable game-theoretic approach for computing an optimal fairness policy. This game-theoretic approach formulates this fairness optimization as a two-player zero-sum game and employs an iterative algorithm for finding a Nash equilibrium, corresponding to an optimal fairness policy.
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.14)
- Europe > Slovenia (0.04)
- Information Technology > Game Theory (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Optimization (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning > Agents > Agent Societies (0.48)
Extracting Fairness Policies from Legal Documents
Nagpal, Rashmi, Wadhwa, Chetna, Gupta, Mallika, Shaikh, Samiulla, Mehta, Sameep, Goyal, Vikram
Machine Learning community is recently exploring the implications of bias and fairness with respect to the AI applications. The definition of fairness for such applications varies based on their domain of application. The policies governing the use of such machine learning system in a given context are defined by the constitutional laws of nations and regulatory policies enforced by the organizations that are involved in the usage. Fairness related laws and policies are often spread across the large documents like constitution, agreements, and organizational regulations. These legal documents have long complex sentences in order to achieve rigorousness and robustness. Automatic extraction of fairness policies, or in general, any specific kind of policies from large legal corpus can be very useful for the study of bias and fairness in the context of AI applications. We attempted to automatically extract fairness policies from publicly available law documents using two approaches based on semantic relatedness. The experiments reveal how classical Wordnet-based similarity and vector-based similarity differ in addressing this task. We have shown that similarity based on word vectors beats the classical approach with a large margin, whereas other vector representations of senses and sentences fail to even match the classical baseline. Further, we have presented thorough error analysis and reasoning to explain the results with appropriate examples from the dataset for deeper insights.
- Law > Civil Rights & Constitutional Law (0.48)
- Law > Labor & Employment Law (0.46)
On Fairness in Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Definitions, Computation, and Comparison
Zhang, Chongjie (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Shah, Julie A. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
The utilitarian solution criterion, which has been extensively studied in multi-agent decision making under uncertainty, aims to maximize the sum of individual utilities. However, as the utilitarian solution often discriminates against some agents, it is not desirable for many practical applications where agents have their own interests and fairness is expected. To address this issue, this paper introduces egalitarian solution criteria for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, which are based on the maximin principle. Motivated by different application domains, we propose four maximin fairness criteria and develop corresponding algorithms for computing their optimal policies. Furthermore, we analyze the connections between these criteria and discuss and compare their characteristics.
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.14)
- North America > United States > California > Santa Clara County > Stanford (0.04)
Fairness in Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making
Zhang, Chongjie, Shah, Julie A.
We define a fairness solution criterion for multi-agent decision-making problems, where agents have local interests. This new criterion aims to maximize the worst performance of agents with consideration on the overall performance. We develop a simple linear programming approach and a more scalable game-theoretic approach for computing an optimal fairness policy. This game-theoretic approach formulates this fairness optimization as a two-player, zero-sum game and employs an iterative algorithm for finding a Nash equilibrium, corresponding to an optimal fairness policy. We scale up this approach by exploiting problem structure and value function approximation. Our experiments on resource allocation problems show that this fairness criterion provides a more favorable solution than the utilitarian criterion, and that our game-theoretic approach is significantly faster than linear programming.
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge (0.14)
- Europe > Slovenia (0.04)