cs.LGJul 6, 2026

Functional Bilevel Optimization for Predictive Fairness

Authors: Ieva PetrulionyteJulien MairalMichael Arbel

Organizations: Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Inria, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LJK, 38000 Grenoble, France

Abstract

When sensitive attributes are continuous and high-dimensional - demographic score vectors, posteriors over attributes, age or income profiles - enforcing full statistical independence is often too restrictive, and existing relaxations rely on indirect dependence penalties or adversarial schemes that do not directly target the fairness-accuracy trade-off. We instead consider mean demographic parity through DPVar, the variance of the conditional-mean prediction given the sensitive attribute, and show that optimizing it yields a functional bilevel problem. We propose two algorithms for this problem: FBO, which uses a closed-form adjoint we derive for the squared-loss case to obtain an exact hypergradient, and ITD, which differentiates through unrolled inner steps and extends beyond squared loss. On synthetic data and a new semi-synthetic benchmark built from 60 tabular regression datasets, both methods achieve the lowest or near-lowest aggregate fairness-accuracy regret, and consistently match or outperform strong HSIC, adversarial, linear-dependence, and generalized-DP baselines.

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