Learning Fair Representations with High-Confidence Guarantees

Abstract: Representation learning is increasingly employed to generate representations that are predictive across multiple downstream tasks. The development of representation learning algorithms that provide strong fairness guarantees is thus important because it can prevent unfairness towards disadvantaged groups for all downstream prediction tasks. To prevent unfairness towards disadvantaged groups in all downstream tasks, it is crucial to provide representation learning algorithms that provide fairness guarantees. In this paper, we formally define the problem of learning representations that are fair with high confidence. We then introduce the Fair Representation learning with high-confidence Guarantees (FRG) framework, which provides high-confidence guarantees for limiting unfairness across all downstream models and tasks, with user-defined upper bounds. After proving that FRG ensures fairness for all downstream models and tasks with high probability, we present empirical evaluations that demonstrate FRG's effectiveness at upper bounding unfairness for multiple downstream models and tasks.