On Demographic Group Fairness Guarantees in Deep Learning.

Λεπτομέρειες βιβλιογραφικής εγγραφής
Τίτλος: On Demographic Group Fairness Guarantees in Deep Learning.
Συγγραφείς: Luo Y, Wen C, Shi M, Huang H, Fang Y, Wang M
Πηγή: IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence [IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell] 2026 Jul; Vol. 48 (7), pp. 8075-8092.
Τύπος έκδοσης: Journal Article
Γλώσσα: English
Στοιχεία περιοδικού: Publisher: IEEE Computer Society Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 9885960 Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1939-3539 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00985589 NLM ISO Abbreviation: IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell Subsets: MEDLINE
Imprint Name(s): Original Publication: [New York] IEEE Computer Society.
Ιατρικοί όροι (MeSH): Deep Learning* , Demography*, Humans ; Algorithms
Περίληψη: We present a theoretical framework analyzing the relationship between data distributions and fairness guarantees in deep learning. Our work establishes novel bounds that explicitly account for data distribution heterogeneity across demographic groups, while introducing a formal analysis framework that minimizes expected loss differences across these groups. Moreover, we derive bounds for fairness errors and convergence rates, characterizing how distributional differences between groups affect the fundamental trade-off between fairness and accuracy. Through extensive experiments on diverse datasets across various modalities (image, tabular data, and text), including FairVision (eye disease detection), CheXpert (pleural effusion detection), HAM10000 (skin lesion classification), FairFace (facial attribute recognition), ACS Income (income prediction), CivilComments-WILDS (toxic comment detection), we validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that differences in feature distributions across demographic groups significantly impact model fairness, with performance disparities particularly pronounced in racial categories. The theoretical bounds we derive corroborate these empirical observations, providing insights into the fundamental limits of achieving fairness in deep learning models when faced with heterogeneous data distributions. This work advances our understanding of fairness in AI and provides a theoretical foundation for developing more equitable algorithms. Motivated by these theoretical insights, particularly the link between feature distribution shifts and fairness gaps, we propose Fairness-Aware Regularization (FAR), a practical training objective that directly minimizes inter-group discrepancies in feature centroids and covariances to improve equitable performance. We validate the effectiveness of FAR across all datasets considered in this study, consistently observing improvements in overall AUC, ES-AUC, and subgroup performance.
Grant Information: R01 EY036222 United States EY NEI NIH HHS; P30 EY003790 United States EY NEI NIH HHS
Entry Date(s): Date Created: 20260316 Date Completed: 20260606 Latest Revision: 20260612
Update Code: 20260613
DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2026.3674484
PMID: 41838507
Βάση Δεδομένων: MEDLINE
Περιγραφή
ISSN:1939-3539
DOI:10.1109/TPAMI.2026.3674484