To address issues of group-level fairness in machine learning, it is natural to adjust model parameters based on specific fairness objectives over a sensitive-attributed validation set. Such an adjustment procedure can be cast within a meta-learning framework. However, naive integration of fairness goals via meta-learning can cause hypergradient conflicts for subgroups, resulting in unstable convergence and compromising model performance and fairness. To navigate this issue, we frame the resolution of hypergradient conflicts as a multi-player cooperative bargaining game. We introduce a two-stage meta-learning framework in which the first stage involves the use of a Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) to resolve hypergradient conflicts and steer the model toward the Pareto front, and the second stage optimizes with respect to specific fairness goals.Our method is supported by theoretical results, notably a proof of the NBS for gradient aggregation free from linear independence assumptions, a proof of Pareto improvement, and a proof of monotonic improvement in validation loss.

The traditional formulation of machine learning is in terms of a system that improves its predictive and decision-making performance by interacting with an environment. Such a formulation is overly narrow in emerging applications--it lumps the social context of a learning system into the undifferentiated concept of an "environment" and provides no special consideration of the collective nature of learning. Such social context includes notions of scarcity and conflict, as well as goals such as social norms and collaborative work that are best formulated at the level of social collectives. The neglect of such considerations in traditional machine learning leads to undesirable outcomes in real-world deployments of machine learning systems, including outcomes that favor particular groups of people over others [44, 7, 31, 10, 38, 51], the amplification of social biases and stereotypes [28, 14, 47], and an ongoing lack of clarity regarding issues of communication, trust, and fairness. Our focus is the current paper is fairness, and we take a perspective on fairness that blends learning methodology with economic mechanisms. The current favored methodology for addressing fairness recognizes that it is not a one-size-fits-all concept--different fairness notions are appropriate for different social settings [49, 32, 50]--and treats fairness via meta-learning ideas. Meta-learning is implemented algorithmically with the tools of bi-level optimization. Specifically, fairness-aware metalearning employs outer optimization to align with a specific fairness goal over a small, demographically balanced validation set to adjust a set of hyperparameters, while the inner optimization minimizes the hyperparameter-adjusted training loss [43, 52, 53].