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FAIRM: Learning invariant representations for algorithmic fairness and domain generalization with minimax optimality

2024/04/02 by Sai Li, Linjun Zhang, Li, Sai +1
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Machine Learning and Data Classification #Methodology (stat.ME)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.01608

openalex publication_date 2024/04/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Machine learning methods often assume that the test data have the same distribution as the training data. However, this assumption may not hold due to multiple levels of heterogeneity in applications, raising issues in algorithmic fairness and domain generalization. In this work, we address the problem of fair and generalizable machine learning by invariant principles. We propose a training environment-based oracle, FAIRM, which has desirable fairness and domain generalization properties under a diversity-type condition. We then provide an empirical FAIRM with finite-sample theoretical guarantees under weak distributional assumptions. We then develop efficient algorithms to realize FAIRM in linear models and demonstrate the nonasymptotic performance with minimax optimality. We evaluate our method in numerical experiments with synthetic data and MNIST data and show that it outperforms its counterparts.

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