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Fairness and Sequential Decision Making: Limits, Lessons, and Opportunities

2023/01/13 by Samer B. Nashed, Justin Svegliato, Nashed, Samer B. +3
Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.05753

openalex publication_date 2023/01/13 · openalex created_date 2023/01/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

As automated decision making and decision assistance systems become common in everyday life, research on the prevention or mitigation of potential harms that arise from decisions made by these systems has proliferated. However, various research communities have independently conceptualized these harms, envisioned potential applications, and proposed interventions. The result is a somewhat fractured landscape of literature focused generally on ensuring decision-making algorithms "do the right thing". In this paper, we compare and discuss work across two major subsets of this literature: algorithmic fairness, which focuses primarily on predictive systems, and ethical decision making, which focuses primarily on sequential decision making and planning. We explore how each of these settings has articulated its normative concerns, the viability of different techniques for these different settings, and how ideas from each setting may have utility for the other.

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