Algorithmic Fairness

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Overview

The field asks whether automated systems treat people and groups fairly, using criteria such as demographic parity, equalized odds, individual similarity, and causal or counterfactual fairness. Researchers audit disparities in credit, hiring, healthcare, recommendation, and language or vision models, using benchmarks such as COMPAS, Adult, and MIMIC alongside subgroup and intersectional tests. Mitigation ranges from data reweighting and representation learning to constrained or robust optimization, causal interventions, and post-hoc thresholding; work also studies fairness in rankings, sequential allocation, federated learning, and LLM agents. A central challenge is that fairness criteria can conflict with one another and with utility, while estimates and interventions may be unstable under small samples, distribution shift, strategic behavior, or uncertain causal assumptions.

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424 papers28 papers in the last four weeks, down 20% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Apr 8, 2026

Robust Fair Disease Diagnosis in CT Images

Automated diagnosis from chest CT has improved considerably with deep learning, but models trained on skewed datasets tend to perform unevenly across patient demographics. However, the situation is worse than simple demographic bias. In clinical data, class imbalance and group underrepresentation often coincide, creating compound failure modes that neither standard rebalancing nor fairness corrections can fix alone. We introduce a two-level objective that targets both axes of this problem. Logit-adjusted cross-entropy loss operates at the sample level, shifting decision margins by class frequency with provable consistency guarantees. Conditional Value at Risk aggregation operates at the group level, directing optimization pressure toward whichever demographic group currently has the higher loss. We evaluate on the Fair Disease Diagnosis benchmark using a 3D ResNet-18 pretrained on Kinetics-400, classifying CT volumes into Adenocarcinoma, Squamous Cell Carcinoma, COVID-19, and Normal groups with patient sex annotations. The training set illustrates the compound problem concretely: squamous cell carcinoma has 84 samples total, 5 of them female. The combined loss reaches a gender-averaged macro F1 of 0.8403 with a fairness gap of 0.0239, a 13.3% improvement in score and 78% reduction in demographic disparity over the baseline. Ablations show that each component alone falls short. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/Fair-Disease-Diagnosis.

Justin Li, Daniel Ding, Asmita Yuki Pritha +3

Carmel High School, Carmel, Indiana, USA · Capstone School Dhaka, Bangladesh · Clarkstown High School South, West Nyack, New York, USA +2

Group Distributionally Robust OptimizationFairness in Medical Image ClassificationAlgorithmic FairnessMedical Image ClassificationClass-Imbalanced Learning
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Apr 7, 2026

Evaluating Intersectional Fairness across Clinical Machine Learning Use Cases using Fairlogue and the All of Us Research Program

Intersectional biases in healthcare data can produce compound disparities in clinical machine learning models, yet most fairness evaluations assess demographic attributes independently. FairLogue, a toolkit for intersectional fairness auditing, was applied across multiple clinical prediction tasks to evaluate disparities across combined demographic groups. Using the All of Us dataset, two published models were selected for replication and evaluation: (A) prediction of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor associated bleeding events and (B) two-year stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation. Observational fairness metrics were computed across race, gender, and intersectional subgroups, followed by counterfactual analysis to evaluate whether disparities were attributable to group membership. Intersectional evaluation revealed larger disparities than single-axis analyses; however, counterfactual diagnostics indicated that most observed disparities were comparable to those expected under randomized group membership. These results highlight the importance of intersectional fairness auditing and demonstrate how FairLogue provides deeper insight into bias in clinical machine learning systems.

Nick Souligne, Vignesh Subbian

College of Engineering, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, United States

Algorithmic FairnessIntersectional Fairness
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Apr 7, 2026

Revisiting Fairness Impossibility with Endogenous Behavior

In many real-world settings, institutions can and do adjust the consequences attached to algorithmic classification decisions, such as the size of fines, sentence lengths, or benefit levels. We refer to these consequences as the stakes associated with classification. These stakes can give rise to behavioral responses to classification, as people adjust their actions in anticipation of how they will be classified. Much of the algorithmic fairness literature evaluates classification outcomes while holding behavior fixed, treating behavioral differences across groups as exogenous features of the environment. Under this assumption, the stakes of classification play no role in shaping outcomes. We revisit classic impossibility results in algorithmic fairness in a setting where people respond strategically to classification. We show that, in this environment, the well-known incompatibility between error-rate balance and predictive parity disappears, but only by potentially introducing a qualitatively different form of unequal treatment. Concretely, we construct a two-stage design in which a classifier first standardizes its statistical performance across groups, and then adjusts stakes so as to induce comparable patterns of behavior. This requires treating groups differently in the consequences attached to identical classification decisions. Our results demonstrate that fairness in strategic settings cannot be assessed solely by how algorithms map data into decisions. Rather, our analysis treats the human consequences of classification as primary design variables, introduces normative criteria governing their use, and shows that their interaction with statistical fairness criteria generates qualitatively new tradeoffs. Our aim is to make these tradeoffs precise and explicit.

Elizabeth Maggie Penn, John W. Patty

Departments of Political Science and Data & Decision Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta GA, USA.

Algorithmic FairnessGroup FairnessStrategic Classification
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Apr 6, 2026

FairLogue: A Toolkit for Intersectional Fairness Analysis in Clinical Machine Learning Models

Objective: Algorithmic fairness is essential for equitable and trustworthy machine learning in healthcare. Most fairness tools emphasize single-axis demographic comparisons and may miss compounded disparities affecting intersectional populations. This study introduces Fairlogue, a toolkit designed to operationalize intersectional fairness assessment in observational and counterfactual contexts within clinical settings. Methods: Fairlogue is a Python-based toolkit composed of three components: 1) an observational framework extending demographic parity, equalized odds, and equal opportunity difference to intersectional populations; 2) a counterfactual framework evaluating fairness under treatment-based contexts; and 3) a generalized counterfactual framework assessing fairness under interventions on intersectional group membership. The toolkit was evaluated using electronic health record data from the All of Us Controlled Tier V8 dataset in a glaucoma surgery prediction task using logistic regression with race and gender as protected attributes. Results: Observational analysis identified substantial intersectional disparities despite moderate model performance (AUROC = 0.709; accuracy = 0.651). Intersectional evaluation revealed larger fairness gaps than single-axis analyses, including demographic parity differences of 0.20 and equalized odds true positive and false positive rate gaps of 0.33 and 0.15, respectively. Counterfactual analysis using permutation-based null distributions produced unfairness ("u-value") estimates near zero, suggesting observed disparities were consistent with chance after conditioning on covariates. Conclusion: Fairlogue provides a modular toolkit integrating observational and counterfactual methods for quantifying and evaluating intersectional bias in clinical machine learning workflows.

Nick Souligne, Vignesh Subbian

Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Arizona, 1127 E. James E. Rogers Way, Tucson, AZ, 85721-0020, United States

Algorithmic FairnessIntersectional FairnessCounterfactual Fairness
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Apr 5, 2026

APPA: Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment for Fair Federated RLHF of LLMs

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human preferences requires pluralistic alignment, where a single model must respect the values of multiple distinct groups simultaneously. In federated reinforcement learning from human feedback (FedRLHF), these groups align a shared policy without centralizing preference data, which makes fair reward aggregation essential. Existing aggregation methods exhibit clear trade offs: average based aggregation systematically under aligns worst performing groups, while min aggregation prioritizes worst group performance at the cost of overall alignment. We propose APPA, an Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment framework that dynamically reweights group level rewards based on historical alignment rewards. Our approach prioritizes under aligned groups without degrading well aligned ones, while requiring no access to raw preference data. Integrated into a proximal policy optimization (PPO) based FedRLHF pipeline and evaluated on GLOBALQA and OQA across three model families (Gemma 2 2B, Llama 3.2 3B, Qwen3 0.6B), APPA achieves strong fairness alignment trade offs, improving worst group alignment by up to 28% over average aggregation while maintaining higher overall alignment than min aggregation across most configurations.

Mahmoud Srewa, Tianyu Zhao, Salma Elmalaki

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA

LLM AlignmentPluralistic AlignmentRL from Human FeedbackAlgorithmic FairnessFederated Learning Aggregation
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Apr 3, 2026

Apparent Age Estimation: Challenges and Outcomes

Apparent age estimation is a valuable tool for business personalization, yet current models frequently exhibit demographic biases. We review prior works on the DEX method by applying distribution learning techniques such as Mean-Variance Loss (MVL) and Adaptive Mean-Residue Loss (AMRL), and evaluate them in both accuracy and fairness. Using IMDB-WIKI, APPA-REAL, and FairFace, we demonstrate that while AMRL achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, trade-offs between precision and demographic equity persist. Despite clear age clustering in UMAP embeddings, our saliency maps indicate inconsistent feature focus across demographics, leading to significant performance degradation for Asian and African American populations. We argue that technical improvements alone are insufficient; accurate and fair apparent age estimation requires the integration of localized and diverse datasets, and strict adherence to fairness validation protocols.

Justin Rainier Go, Lorenz Bernard Marqueses, Mikaella Kaye Martinez +2

De La Salle University Manila, Philippines

Algorithmic Fairness
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Apr 2, 2026

Modeling User Exploration Saturation: When Recommender Systems Should Stop Pushing Novelty

Fairness-aware recommender systems often mitigate bias by increasing exposure to under-represented or long-tail content, commonly through mechanisms that promote novelty and diversity. In practice, the strength of such interventions is typically controlled using global hyperparameters, fixed regularization weights, heuristic caps, or offline tuning strategies. These approaches implicitly assume that a single level of exploration is appropriate across users, contexts, and stages of interaction. In this work, we study exploration saturation as a user-dependent phenomenon arising from fairness- and novelty-driven recommendation strategies. We define exploration saturation as the point at which further increases in exploration no longer improve user utility and may instead reduce engagement or perceived relevance. Rather than proposing a new fairness-aware algorithm or optimizing a specific objective, we empirically analyze how increasing exploration affects users across varied recommendation models. Through longitudinal experiments using MovieLens-1M and Last.fm datasets, our results indicate that fairness-induced exploration exhibits diminishing or non-monotonic returns and varies substantially across users. In particular, users with limited interaction histories tend to reach saturation earlier, suggesting that uniform fairness or novelty pressure can disproportionately disadvantage certain users. These findings reveal a trade-off between fairness and user experience, suggesting that recommendation systems should adapt not only to relevance but also to the amount of fairness-driven exploration applied to individual users.

Enock O. Ayiku, Evelyn Osei, Emebo Onyeka

University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA · Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA · Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Recommender SystemsFairness in Recommender SystemsExploration-Exploitation TradeoffAlgorithmic Fairness
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Apr 2, 2026

InsightBoard: An Interactive Multi-Metric Visualization and Fairness Analysis Plugin for TensorBoard

Modern machine learning systems deployed in safety-critical domains require visibility not only into aggregate performance but also into how training dynamics affect subgroup fairness over time. Existing training dashboards primarily support single-metric monitoring and offer limited support for examining relationships between heterogeneous metrics or diagnosing subgroup disparities during training. We present InsightBoard, an interactive TensorBoard plugin that integrates synchronized multi-metric visualization with slice-based fairness diagnostics in a unified interface. InsightBoard enables practitioners to jointly inspect training dynamics, performance metrics, and subgroup disparities through linked multi-view plots, correlation analysis, and standard group fairness indicators computed over user-defined slices. Through case studies with YOLOX on the BDD100k dataset, we demonstrate that models achieving strong aggregate performance can still exhibit substantial demographic and environmental disparities that remain hidden under conventional monitoring. By making fairness diagnostics available during training, InsightBoard supports earlier, more informed model inspection without modifying existing training pipelines or introducing additional data stores.

Ray Zeyao Chen, Christan Grant

Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Visual AnalyticsAlgorithmic Fairness
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Apr 2, 2026

SEAL: An Open, Auditable, and Fair Data Generation Framework for AI-Native 6G Networks

AI-native 6G networks promise to transform the telecom industry by enabling dynamic resource allocation, predictive maintenance, and ultra-reliable low-latency communications across all layers, which are essential for applications such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and immersive XR. However, the deployment of 6G systems results in severe data scarcity, hindering the training of efficient AI models. Synthetic data generation is extensively used to fill this gap; however, it introduces challenges related to dataset bias, auditability, and compliance with regulatory frameworks. In this regard, we propose the Synthetic Data Generation with Ethics Audit Loop (SEAL) framework, which extends baseline modular pipelines with an Ethical and Regulatory Compliance by Design (ERCD) module and a Federated Learning (FL) feedback system. The ERCD integrates fairness, bias detection, and standardized audit trails for regulatory mapping, while the FL enables privacy-preserving calibration using aggregated insights from real testbeds to close the reality-simulation gap. Results show that the SEAL framework outperforms existing methods in terms of Frechet Inception Distance, equalized odds, and accuracy. These results validate the framework's ability to generate auditable and bias-mitigated synthetic data for responsible AI-native 6G development.

Sunder Ali Khowaja, Kapal Dev, Engin Zeydan +1

CONNECT Centre,School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland · CONNECT Centre, Munster Technological University, Ireland · Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC/CERCA), Castelldefels, Spain +1

Synthetic Data Generation6G NetworksAI GovernanceAlgorithmic Fairness
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Apr 2, 2026

QoS-Aware Token Scheduling and Private Data Valuation for Multi-Modal Agentic Networks

In agentic systems, human-generated data records anchor the value of AI services. Yet cloud compute pipelines centralize processing on remote servers. Data centralization reduces personal data sovereignty and may potentially degrade the quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, user contributions are diverse in quantity and quality: decentralized records can be biased, noisy, and heterogeneously distributed. To address the data challenge, we study fair token allocation and private data valuation for decentralized and resource-constrained agentic systems. Our approach embeds multi-modal representations in a shared semantic space and releases differentially private (DP) prototypes to preserve utility while reducing semantic leakage. With the DP guarantee, we design a fair token allocation scheme that rewards effective contributions and remains robust to data heterogeneity and AI resource scarcity. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved contribution-based fairness and QoS compared to standard benchmarks. The improved resistance to image reconstruction attacks indicates enhanced privacy for multi-modal personal data.

Yao Du, Jing Liu, Pengfei Xu +4

The University of British Columbia · LazAI Network · China University of Mining and Technology +2

Data ValuationAlgorithmic FairnessPrivacy-Preserving ML
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Mar 31, 2026

Loss Gap Parity for Fairness in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

While clients may join federated learning to improve performance on data they rarely observe locally, they often remain self-interested, expecting the global model to perform well on their own data. This motivates an objective that ensures all clients achieve a similar loss gap -the difference in performance between the global model and the best model they could train using only their local data-. To this end, we propose EAGLE, a novel federated learning algorithm that explicitly regularizes the global model to minimize disparities in loss gaps across clients. Our approach is particularly effective in heterogeneous settings, where the optimal local models of the clients may be misaligned. Unlike existing methods that encourage loss parity, potentially degrading performance for many clients, EAGLE targets fairness in relative improvements. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for EAGLE under non-convex loss functions, and characterize how its iterates perform relative to the standard federated learning objective using a novel heterogeneity measure. Empirically, we demonstrate that EAGLE reduces the disparity in loss gaps among clients by prioritizing those furthest from their local optimal loss, while maintaining competitive utility in both convex and non-convex cases compared to strong baselines.

Brahim Erraji, Michaël Perrot, Aurélien Bellet

Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 - CRIStAL, F-59000 Lille, France · Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 - CRIStALF-59000 Lille, France · PreMeDICaL team, Inria, Idesp, Inserm, Université de Montpellier

Federated LearningHeterogeneous Federated LearningAlgorithmic Fairness
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Mar 31, 2026

Exploring the Impact of Skin Color on Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality, making early detection critical. AI-driven dermatology systems often rely on skin lesion segmentation as a preprocessing step to delineate the lesion from surrounding skin and support downstream analysis. While fairness concerns regarding skin tone have been widely studied for lesion classification, the influence of skin tone on the segmentation stage remains under-quantified and is frequently assessed using coarse, discrete skin tone categories. In this work, we evaluate three strong segmentation architectures (UNet, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet50 backbone, and DINOv2) on two public dermoscopic datasets (HAM10000 and ISIC2017) and introduce a continuous pigment or contrast analysis that treats pixel-wise ITA values as distributions. Using Wasserstein distances between within-image distributions for skin-only, lesion-only, and whole-image regions, we quantify lesion skin contrast and relate it to segmentation performance across multiple metrics. Within the range represented in these datasets, global skin tone metrics (Fitzpatrick grouping or mean ITA) show weak association with segmentation quality. In contrast, low lesion-skin contrast is consistently associated with larger segmentation errors in models, indicating that boundary ambiguity and low contrast are key drivers of failure. These findings suggest that fairness improvements in dermoscopic segmentation should prioritize robust handling of low-contrast lesions, and the distribution-based pigment measures provide a more informative audit signal than discrete skin-tone categories.

Kuniko Paxton, Medina Kapo, Amila Akagić +3

School of Digital and Physical Sciences at the University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX, United Kingdom · Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Sarajevo, Zmaja od Bosne bb, Sarajevo, 71000, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Fairness in Medical Image ClassificationSkin Lesion SegmentationImage SegmentationAlgorithmic Fairness
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Mar 31, 2026

Unbiased Model Prediction Without Using Protected Attribute Information

The problem of bias persists in the deep learning community as models continue to provide disparate performance across different demographic subgroups. Therefore, several algorithms have been proposed to improve the fairness of deep models. However, a majority of these algorithms utilize the protected attribute information for bias mitigation, which severely limits their application in real-world scenarios. To address this concern, we have proposed a novel algorithm, termed as Non-Protected Attribute-based Debiasing (NPAD) algorithm for bias mitigation, that does not require the protected attribute information. The proposed NPAD algorithm utilizes the auxiliary information provided by the non-protected attributes to optimize the model for bias mitigation. Further, two different loss functions, Debiasing via Attribute Cluster Loss (DACL) and Filter Redundancy Loss (FRL) have been proposed to optimize the model for fairness goals. Multiple experiments are performed on the LFWA and CelebA datasets for facial attribute prediction, and a significant reduction in bias across different gender and age subgroups is observed.

Puspita Majumdar, Surbhi Mittal, Saheb Chhabra +2

IIIT-Delhi, New Delhi, India, 110020

Algorithmic FairnessDebiased ML
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Mar 30, 2026

Why Aggregate Accuracy is Inadequate for Evaluating Fairness in Law Enforcement Facial Recognition Systems

Facial recognition systems are increasingly deployed in law enforcement and security contexts, where algorithmic decisions can carry significant societal consequences. Despite high reported accuracy, growing evidence demonstrates that such systems often exhibit uneven performance across demographic groups, leading to disproportionate error rates and potential harm. This paper argues that aggregate accuracy is an insufficient metric for evaluating the fairness and reliability of facial recognition systems in high-stakes environments. Through analysis of subgroup-level error distribution, including false positive rate (FPR) and false negative rate (FNR), the paper demonstrates how aggregate performance metrics can obscure critical disparities across demographic groups. Empirical observations show that systems with similar overall accuracy can exhibit substantially different fairness profiles, with subgroup error rates varying significantly despite a single aggregate metric. The paper further examines the operational risks associated with accuracy-centric evaluation practices in law enforcement applications, where misclassification may result in wrongful suspicion or missed identification. It highlights the importance of fairness-aware evaluation approaches and model-agnostic auditing strategies that enable post-deployment assessment of real-world systems. The findings emphasise the need to move beyond accuracy as a primary metric and adopt more comprehensive evaluation frameworks for responsible AI deployment.

Khalid Adnan Alsayed

Founder, Ducaltus | AI Assurance & Governance · BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence · School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies

Algorithmic FairnessGroup FairnessFace RecognitionAlgorithmic Auditing
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Mar 30, 2026

FairGC: Fairness-aware Graph Condensation

Graph condensation (GC) has become a vital strategy for scaling Graph Neural Networks by compressing massive datasets into small, synthetic node sets. While current GC methods effectively maintain predictive accuracy, they are primarily designed for utility and often ignore fairness constraints. Because these techniques are bias-blind, they frequently capture and even amplify demographic disparities found in the original data. This leads to synthetic proxies that are unsuitable for sensitive applications like credit scoring or social recommendations. To solve this problem, we introduce FairGC, a unified framework that embeds fairness directly into the graph distillation process. Our approach consists of three key components. First, a Distribution-Preserving Condensation module synchronizes the joint distributions of labels and sensitive attributes to stop bias from spreading. Second, a Spectral Encoding module uses Laplacian eigen-decomposition to preserve essential global structural patterns. Finally, a Fairness-Enhanced Neural Architecture employs multi-domain fusion and a label-smoothing curriculum to produce equitable predictions. Rigorous evaluations on four real-world datasets, show that FairGC provides a superior balance between accuracy and fairness. Our results confirm that FairGC significantly reduces disparity in Statistical Parity and Equal Opportunity compared to existing state-of-the-art condensation models. The codes are available at https://github.com/LuoRenqiang/FairGC.

Yihan Gao, Chenxi Huang, Wen Shi +5

College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, China · Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Intelligent Computing, Dalian University, Dalian, China · School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia +1

Algorithmic FairnessGroup FairnessGraph Neural Networks
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Mar 30, 2026

Fairboard: a quantitative framework for equity assessment of healthcare models

Despite there now being more than 1,000 FDA-authorised AI medical devices, formal equity assessments -- whether model performance is uniform across patient subgroups -- are rare. Here, we evaluate the equity of 18 open-source brain tumour segmentation models across 648 glioma patients from two independent datasets (n = 11,664 model inferences) along distinct univariate, Bayesian multivariate, spatial, and representational dimensions. We find that patient identity consistently explains more performance variance than model choice, with clinical factors, including molecular diagnosis, tumour grade, and extent of resection, predicting segmentation accuracy more strongly than model architecture. A voxel-wise spatial meta-analysis identifies neuroanatomically localised biases that are compartment-specific yet often consistent across models. Within a high-dimensional latent space of lesion masks and clinic-demographic features, model performance clusters significantly, indicating that the patient feature space contains axes of algorithmic vulnerability. Although newer models tend toward greater equity, none provide a formal fairness guarantee. Lastly, we release Fairboard, an open-source, no-code dashboard that lowers barriers to equitable model monitoring in medical imaging.

James K. Ruffle, Samia Mohinta, Chris Foulon +5

Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK · Dept. of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, UK · Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LABRI), Université de Bordeaux, France

Algorithmic FairnessMedical Image SegmentationBrain Tumor Segmentation
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Mar 29, 2026

Decomposing Discrimination: Causal Mediation Analysis for AI-Driven Credit Decisions

Statistical fairness metrics in AI-driven credit decisions conflate two causally distinct mechanisms: discrimination operating directly from a protected attribute to a credit outcome, and structural inequality propagating through legitimate financial features. We formalise this distinction using Pearl's framework of natural direct and indirect effects applied to the credit decision setting. Our primary theoretical contribution is an identification strategy for natural direct and indirect effects under treatment-induced confounding -- the prevalent setting in which protected attributes causally affect both financial mediators and the final decision, violating standard sequential ignorability. We show that interventional direct and indirect effects (IDE/IIE) are identified under the weaker Modified Sequential Ignorability assumption, and prove that IDE/IIE provide conservative bounds on the unidentified natural effects under monotone indirect treatment response. We propose a doubly-robust augmented inverse probability weighted (AIPW) estimator for IDE/IIE with semiparametric efficiency properties, implemented via cross-fitting. An E-value sensitivity analysis addresses residual confounding on the direct pathway. Empirical evaluation on 89,465 real HMDA conventional purchase mortgage applications from New York State (2022) demonstrates that approximately 77% of the observed 7.9 percentage-point racial denial disparity operates through financial mediators shaped by structural inequality, while the remaining 23% constitutes a conservative lower bound on direct discrimination. The open-source CausalFair Python package implements the full pipeline for deployment at resource-constrained financial institutions.

Duraimurugan Rajamanickam

VP, Artificial Intelligence, Hudson Valley Credit Union, Poughkeepsie, NY · PhD Candidate, Causal Machine Learning, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Financial ServicesCausal Effect EstimationCausal Mediation AnalysisAlgorithmic FairnessCausal AttributionCausal Inference+3
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Mar 27, 2026

Shapley meets Rawls: an integrated framework for measuring and explaining unfairness

Explainability and fairness have mainly been considered separately, with recent exceptions trying the explain the sources of unfairness. This paper shows that the Shapley value can be used to both define and explain unfairness, under standard group fairness criteria. This offers an integrated framework to estimate and derive inference on unfairness as-well-as the features that contribute to it. Our framework can also be extended from Shapley values to the family of Efficient-Symmetric-Linear (ESL) values, some of which offer more robust definitions of fairness, and shorter computation times. An illustration is run on the Census Income dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Our approach shows that Age", Number of hours" and ``Marital status" generate gender unfairness, using shorter computation time than traditional Bootstrap tests.

Fadoua Amri-Jouidel, Emmanuel Kemel, Stéphane Mussard

UM6P Airess · Greghec, Crns HEC Paris

Algorithmic FairnessGroup FairnessShapley Value Attribution
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Mar 27, 2026

Fair Data Pre-Processing with Imperfect Attribute Space

Fair data pre-processing is a widely used strategy for mitigating bias in machine learning. A promising line of research focuses on calibrating datasets to satisfy a designed fairness policy so that sensitive attributes influence outcomes only through clearly specified legitimate causal pathways. While effective on clean and information-rich data, these methods often break down in real-world scenarios with imperfect attribute spaces, where decision-relevant factors may be deemed unusable or even missing. To address this gap, we propose LatentPre, a novel framework that enables principled and robust fair data processing in practical settings. Instead of relying solely on observed attributes, LatentPre augments the fairness policy with latent attributes that capture essential but subtle signals, enabling the framework to operate as if the attribute space were perfect. These latent attributes are strategically introduced to guarantee identifiability and are estimated using a tailored expectation-maximization paradigm. The raw data is then carefully refined to conform to this latent-augmented policy, effectively removing biased patterns while preserving justifiable ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentPre consistently achieves strong fairness-utility trade-offs across diverse scenarios, advancing practical fairness-aware data management.

Ying Zheng, Yangfan Jiang, Kian-Lee Tan

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Algorithmic FairnessTraining Data Curation
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Mar 26, 2026

Explainable Speech Emotion Recognition: Weighted Attribute Fairness to Model Demographic Contributions to Social Bias

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems have growing applications in sensitive domains such as mental health and education, where biased predictions can cause harm. Traditional fairness metrics, such as Equalised Odds and Demographic Parity, often overlook the joint dependency between demographic attributes and model predictions. We propose a fairness modelling approach for SER that explicitly captures allocative bias by learning the joint relationship between demographic attributes and model error. We validate our fairness metric on synthetic data, then apply it to evaluate HuBERT and WavLM models finetuned on the CREMA-D dataset. Our results indicate that the proposed fairness model captures more mutual information between protected attributes and biases and quantifies the absolute contribution of individual attributes to bias in SSL-based SER models. Additionally, our analysis reveals indications of gender bias in both HuBERT and WavLM.

Tomisin Ogunnubi, Yupei Li, Björn Schuller

Algorithmic FairnessSpeech Emotion Recognition
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Mar 26, 2026

Demographic Fairness in Multimodal LLMs: A Benchmark of Gender and Ethnicity Bias in Face Verification

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently been explored as face verification systems that determine whether two face images are of the same person. Unlike dedicated face recognition systems, MLLMs approach this task through visual prompting and rely on general visual and reasoning abilities. However, the demographic fairness of these models remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a benchmarking study that evaluates nine open-source MLLMs from six model families, ranging from 2B to 8B parameters, on the IJB-C and RFW face verification protocols across four ethnicity groups and two gender groups. We measure verification accuracy with the Equal Error Rate and True Match Rate at multiple operating points per demographic group, and we quantify demographic disparity with four FMR-based fairness metrics. Our results show that FaceLLM-8B, the only face-specialised model in our study, substantially outperforms general-purpose MLLMs on both benchmarks. The bias patterns we observe differ from those commonly reported for traditional face recognition, with different groups being most affected depending on the benchmark and the model. We also note that the most accurate models are not necessarily the fairest and that models with poor overall accuracy can appear fair simply because they produce uniformly high error rates across all demographic groups.

Ünsal Öztürk, Hatef Otroshi Shahreza, Sébastien Marcel

Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland

Algorithmic FairnessMultimodal Large Language ModelsFace RecognitionMultimodal Model Evaluation
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Mar 26, 2026

Scheduling with Time Dependent Utilities: Fairness and Efficiency

A new class of multi agent single machine scheduling problems is introduced, where each job is associated with a self interested agent with a utility function decreasing in completion time. We aim to achieve a fair solution by maximizing the minimum utility across all agents. We study the problem's complexity and propose solution methods for several variants. For the general case, we present a binary search procedure to find the largest possible minimum utility, as well as an exact greedy based alternative. Variants with release and due dates are analyzed, showing strong NP hardness for arbitrary release dates, but weak NP hardness for a single release date job, and polynomial solvability when all jobs share processing times. For all these cases we also study the corresponding problem of finding efficient solutions where the sum of utilities is maximized. We also examine settings where linear utility functions can be adjusted within budget constraints, exploring the impact on optimal schedules when intercepts or slopes are modified. From a single agent perspective, we investigate the effect of improving one agent's utility in the overall solution. Adding a new job to be inserted with the best possible utility gives rise to rescheduling problems, where different lower bounds depending on the utilities of the original fair schedule are imposed. Finally, we consider a bi level setting where a leader wants to enforce a certain target schedule by modifying utility functions while the follower computes a fair solution for the modified instance. Our work contributes to scheduling theory, multi agent systems, and algorithmic fairness, highlighting fairness oriented objectives in competitive scheduling.

Gaia Nicosia, Andrea Pacifici, Ulrich Pferschy

Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Informatica e delle Tecnologie Aeronautiche, Università degli Studi “Roma Tre”, via della Vasca Navale 79, 00146 Rome, Italy · Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Ingegneria Informatica, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy · Department of Operations and Information Systems, University of Graz, Universitaetsstrasse 15, 8010 Graz, Austria

Fair Resource AllocationCombinatorial OptimizationAlgorithmic FairnessMulti-Agent Systems
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Mar 26, 2026

AD-CARE: A Guideline-grounded, Modality-agnostic LLM Agent for Real-world Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis with Multi-cohort Assessment, Fairness Analysis, and Reader Study

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a growing global health challenge as populations age, and timely, accurate diagnosis is essential to reduce individual and societal burden. However, real-world AD assessment is hampered by incomplete, heterogeneous multimodal data and variability across sites and patient demographics. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in biomedicine, their use in AD has largely been confined to answering narrow, disease-specific questions rather than generating comprehensive diagnostic reports that support clinical decision-making. Here we expand LLM capabilities for clinical decision support by introducing AD-CARE, a modality-agnostic agent that performs guideline-grounded diagnostic assessment from incomplete, heterogeneous inputs without imputing missing modalities. By dynamically orchestrating specialized diagnostic tools and embedding clinical guidelines into LLM-driven reasoning, AD-CARE generates transparent, report-style outputs aligned with real-world clinical workflows. Across six cohorts comprising 10,303 cases, AD-CARE achieved 84.9% diagnostic accuracy, delivering 4.2%-13.7% relative improvements over baseline methods. Despite cohort-level differences, dataset-specific accuracies remain robust (80.4%-98.8%), and the agent consistently outperforms all baselines. AD-CARE reduced performance disparities across racial and age subgroups, decreasing the average dispersion of four metrics by 21%-68% and 28%-51%, respectively. In a controlled reader study, the agent improved neurologist and radiologist accuracy by 6%-11% and more than halved decision time. The framework yielded 2.29%-10.66% absolute gains over eight backbone LLMs and converges their performance. These results show that AD-CARE is a scalable, practically deployable framework that can be integrated into routine clinical workflows for multimodal decision support in AD.

Wenlong Hou, Sheng Bi, Guangqian Yang +16

Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China. · Amazon, USA. +10

Alzheimer's Disease ClassificationClinical Decision SupportMedical LLMsLLM AgentsAlgorithmic Fairness
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Mar 26, 2026

Fair regression under localized demographic parity constraints

Demographic parity (DP) is a widely used group fairness criterion requiring predictive distributions to be invariant across sensitive groups. While natural in classification, full distributional DP is often overly restrictive in regression and can lead to substantial accuracy loss. We propose a relaxation of DP tailored to regression, enforcing parity only at a finite set of quantile levels and/or score thresholds. Concretely, we introduce a novel (ℓ{\ell}, Z)-fair predictor, which imposes groupwise CDF constraints of the form F f |S=s (z m ) = ℓ{\ell} m for prescribed pairs (ℓ{\ell} m , z m ). For this setting, we derive closed-form characterizations of the optimal fair discretized predictor via a Lagrangian dual formulation and quantify the discretization cost, showing that the risk gap to the continuous optimum vanishes as the grid is refined. We further develop a model-agnostic post-processing algorithm based on two samples (labeled for learning a base regressor and unlabeled for calibration), and establish finite-sample guarantees on constraint violation and excess penalized risk. In addition, we introduce two alternative frameworks where we match group and marginal CDF values at selected score thresholds. In both settings, we provide closed-form solutions for the optimal fair discretized predictor. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets illustrate an interpretable fairness-accuracy trade-off, enabling targeted corrections at decision-relevant quantiles or thresholds while preserving predictive performance.

Arthur Charpentier, Christophe Denis, Romuald Elie +2

UQAM · Université du Québec à Montréal, UQAM, Canada · Kyoto University, Japan +7

Algorithmic FairnessGroup Fairness
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Mar 25, 2026

Exploring How Fair Model Representations Relate to Fair Recommendations

One of the many fairness definitions pursued in recent recommender system research targets mitigating demographic information encoded in model representations. Models optimized for this definition are typically evaluated on how well demographic attributes can be classified given model representations, with the (implicit) assumption that this measure accurately reflects recommendation parity, i.e., how similar recommendations given to different users are. We challenge this assumption by comparing the amount of demographic information encoded in representations with various measures of how the recommendations differ. We propose two new approaches for measuring how well demographic information can be classified given ranked recommendations. Our results from extensive testing of multiple models on one real and multiple synthetically generated datasets indicate that optimizing for fair representations positively affects recommendation parity, but also that evaluation at the representation level is not a good proxy for measuring this effect when comparing models. We also provide extensive insight into how recommendation-level fairness metrics behave for various models by evaluating their performances on numerous generated datasets with different properties.

Bjørnar Vassøy, Benjamin Kille, Helge Langseth

Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Fairness in Recommender SystemsAlgorithmic FairnessRecommender SystemsGroup FairnessRepresentation Learning
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Mar 25, 2026

Federated fairness-aware classification under differential privacy

Privacy and algorithmic fairness have become two central issues in modern machine learning. Although each has separately emerged as a rapidly growing research area, their joint effect remains comparatively under-explored. In this paper, we systematically study the joint impact of differential privacy and fairness on classification in a federated setting, where data are distributed across multiple servers. Targeting demographic disparity constrained classification under federated differential privacy, we propose a two-step algorithm, namely FDP-Fair. In the special case where there is only one server, we further propose a simple yet powerful algorithm, namely CDP-Fair, serving as a computationally-lightweight alternative. Under mild structural assumptions, theoretical guarantees on privacy, fairness and excess risk control are established. In particular, we disentangle the source of the private fairness-aware excess risk into a) intrinsic cost of classification, b) cost of private classification, c) non-private cost of fairness and d) private cost of fairness. Our theoretical findings are complemented by extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, highlighting the practicality of our designed algorithms.

Gengyu Xue, Yi Yu

Department of Statistics, University of Warwick

Algorithmic FairnessDifferentially Private Federated LearningDifferential PrivacyGroup Fairness
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Mar 25, 2026

Who Benefits from RAG? The Role of Exposure, Utility and Attribution Bias

Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have achieved substantial improvements in accuracy by grounding their responses in external documents that are relevant to the user's query. However, relatively little work has investigated the impact of RAG in terms of fairness. Particularly, it is not yet known if queries that are associated with certain groups within a fairness category systematically receive higher accuracy, or accuracy improvements in RAG systems compared to LLM-only, a phenomenon we refer to as query group fairness. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the impact of three key factors on query group fairness in RAG, namely: Group exposure, i.e., the proportion of documents from each group appearing in the retrieved set, determined by the retriever; Group utility, i.e., the degree to which documents from each group contribute to improving answer accuracy, capturing retriever-generator interactions; and Group attribution, i.e., the extent to which the generator relies on documents from each group when producing responses. We examine group-level average accuracy and accuracy improvements disparities across four fairness categories using three datasets derived from the TREC 2022 Fair Ranking Track for two tasks: article generation and title generation. Our findings show that RAG systems suffer from the query group fairness problem and amplify disparities in terms of average accuracy across queries from different groups, compared to an LLM-only setting. Moreover, group utility, exposure, and attribution can exhibit strong positive or negative correlations with average accuracy or accuracy improvements of queries from that group, highlighting their important role in fair RAG. Our data and code are publicly available from Github.

Mahdi Dehghan, Graham McDonald

University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Group FairnessAlgorithmic FairnessRetrieval-Augmented GenerationLanguage Model Bias EvaluationRAG Evaluation
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Mar 24, 2026

PopResume: Causal Fairness Evaluation of LLM/VLM Resume Screeners with Population-Representative Dataset

We present PopResume, a population-representative resume dataset for causal fairness auditing of LLM- and VLM-based resume screening systems. Unlike existing benchmarks that rely on manually injected demographic information and outcome-level disparities, PopResume is grounded in population statistics and preserves natural attribute relationships, enabling path-specific effect (PSE)-based fairness evaluation. We decompose the effect of a protected attribute on resume scores into two paths: the business necessity path, mediated by job-relevant qualifications, and the redlining path, mediated by demographic proxies. This distinction allows auditors to separate legally permissible from impermissible sources of disparity. Evaluating four LLMs and four VLMs on PopResume's 60.8K resumes across five occupations, we identify five representative discrimination patterns that aggregate metrics fail to capture. Our results demonstrate that PSE-based evaluation reveals fairness issues masked by outcome-level measures, underscoring the need for causally-grounded auditing frameworks in AI-assisted hiring.

Sumin Yu, Juhyeon Park, Taesup Moon

ECE, Seoul National University · IPAI, Seoul National University · ASRI / INMC / AIIS, Seoul National University

AI-Assisted Decision MakingLLM AuditingAlgorithmic Fairness
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Mar 22, 2026

A Generalised Exponentiated Gradient Approach to Enhance Fairness in Binary and Multi-class Classification Tasks

The widespread use of AI and ML models in sensitive areas raises significant concerns about fairness. While the research community has introduced various methods for bias mitigation in binary classification tasks, the issue remains under-explored in multi-class classification settings. To address this limitation, in this paper, we first formulate the problem of fair learning in multi-class classification as a multi-objective problem between effectiveness (i.e., prediction correctness) and multiple linear fairness constraints. Next, we propose a Generalised Exponentiated Gradient (GEG) algorithm to solve this task. GEG is an in-processing algorithm that enhances fairness in binary and multi-class classification settings under multiple fairness definitions. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of GEG against six baselines across seven multi-class and three binary datasets, using four widely adopted effectiveness metrics and three fairness definitions.

Maryam Boubekraoui, Giordano d'Aloisio, Antinisca Di Marco

Laboratoire d’Intelligence Artificielle et Systèmes Industriels (LIASI), HESTIM Engineering and Business School, Casablanca, Morocco · Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italy

Gradient DescentAlgorithmic FairnessMulticlass Classification
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Mar 22, 2026

ERM-MinMaxGAP: Benchmarking and Mitigating Gender Bias in Multilingual Multimodal Speech-LLM Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition (SER) systems can exhibit gender-related performance disparities, but how such bias manifests in multilingual speech LLMs across languages and modalities is unclear. We introduce a novel multilingual, multimodal benchmark built on MELD-ST, spanning English, Japanese, and German, to quantify language-specific SER performance and gender gaps. We find bias is strongly language-dependent, and multimodal fusion does not reliably improve fairness. To address these, we propose ERM-MinMaxGAP, a fairness-informed training objective, which augments empirical risk minimization (ERM) with a proposed adaptive fairness weight mechanism and a novel MinMaxGAP regularizer on the maximum male-female loss gap within each language and modality. Building upon the Qwen2-Audio backbone, our ERM-MinMaxGAP approach improves multilingual SER performance by 5.5% and 5.0% while reducing the overall gender bias gap by 0.1% and 1.4% in the unimodal and multimodal settings, respectively.

Zi Haur Pang, Xiaoxue Gao, Tatsuya Kawahara +1

Kyoto University, Japan · Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

Speech Emotion RecognitionMultimodal Emotion RecognitionAlgorithmic FairnessSpeech Language Models
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