2024/09/13 by Andrea Cavallo, Madeline Navarro, Cavallo, Andrea +5 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.08558
openalex publication_date 2024/09/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Covariance-based data processing is widespread across signal processing and machine learning applications due to its ability to model data interconnectivities and dependencies. However, harmful biases in the data may become encoded in the sample covariance matrix and cause data-driven methods to treat different subpopulations unfairly. Existing works such as fair principal component analysis (PCA) mitigate these effects, but remain unstable in low sample regimes, which in turn may jeopardize the fairness goal. To address both biases and instability, we propose Fair coVariance Neural Networks (FVNNs), which perform graph convolutions on the covariance matrix for both fair and accurate predictions. Our FVNNs provide a flexible model compatible with several existing bias mitigation techniques. In particular, FVNNs allow for mitigating the bias in two ways: first, they operate on fair covariance estimates that remove biases from their principal components; second, they are trained in an end-to-end fashion via a fairness regularizer in the loss function so that the model parameters are tailored to solve the task directly in a fair manner. We prove that FVNNs are intrinsically fairer than analogous PCA approaches thanks to their stability in low sample regimes. We validate the robustness and fairness of our model on synthetic and real-world data, showcasing the flexibility of FVNNs along with the tradeoff between fair and accurate performance.